Killers

by Laurence Gough

  Gerard watched her closely as she tried the wine, nodded her approval. The sommelier lifted the bottle but Gerard put his hand over the mouth of Susan’s glass and said quite firmly that they’d have another gin and tonic and let the wine breathe a little, until the meal was served.

  As it turned out, this took quite some time. It was mid-afternoon by the time they’d finished eating. Gerard ordered digestifs. He lit a cigar. This was something new. As she sipped her drink, Susan felt a little off-balance, vaguely alarmed. She was fairly confident that she wasn’t exactly drunk. But not at all confident that she was going-to-church sober. She did know that she was enjoying herself immensely.

  She asked Gerard if she could try his cigar. He gave her an odd look. Have a puff, she explained. She saw she’d unsettled him, and was ridiculously pleased with herself. He handed her the cigar and she put it in her mouth and blew a cloud of smoke at the ceiling, then gave the cigar back to him.

  She noticed that he paid for the meal simply by signing the bill. That didn’t make sense, although she wasn’t sure exactly why.

  Gerard tossed the hotel pen on the table — a casual, subtly controlling gesture. He asked Susan if she was ready to move along, then helped her with her chair and took her by the hand and guided her to the hotel lobby. She wondered aloud how long it would take to get to the exhibition. Laughing, he squeezed her hand and told her not to worry about it.

  Everything in its own time, he said.

  Gerard had led her to a bank of elevators, pushed a button. He made small talk about art. The doors slid open and in they went. Susan felt a giddiness in her stomach as they shot upwards.

  She asked Gerard where they were going. He smiled and looked deeply into her eyes as he told her it was a surprise — she was going to have to try to be patient and that was that.

  He leaned towards her, kissed her on the tip of the nose.

  The elevator doors slid open. Gerard guided her down a discreetly lit hallway. He had a rectangular plastic card in his hand, silvery and punched through with rows of small round holes.

  They stopped in front of a door remarkably like all the other doors. Gerard inserted the card into a slot beneath the doorknob, cursed softly and withdrew it and turned it over and stuck it in again. A tiny light blinked red and then green. Gerard pushed the door open. Susan blinked, peered into the dimly lit room. Gerard’s hand pressed softly but insistently against the small of her back. His breath on her neck was warm and moist.

  She stepped hesitantly into the room. The air smelled of fresh-cut flowers. Heavy gold drapes had been pulled across the window; the only light came from a wall lamp. A vase stuffed with long-stemmed red roses stood on a small table by the bed, next to a bottle of champagne in a clear plastic ice bucket.

  Susan said, “Isn’t this a surprise?”

  Gerard hung a ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door and firmly shut it. The deadbolt shot home.

  Susan thought, ‘It’s about time’. She tore a button on her blouse, cursed and laughed and plucked frantically at the remaining buttons, noticed at last that the great seducer was standing there with his mouth hanging open, in shock.

  She moved towards him, dropped to her knees and reached for his belt. Gerard stared fixedly at the ice bucket. He seemed to have run out of small talk. But it was obvious things were going to work out just fine, as long as he remembered to keep breathing.

  *

  Someone knocked tentatively on the door. Before she had time to react, it swung open. Ginnie Schulman popped her head in and said, “Have you heard about Dr Roth?”

  Speechless, Susan stared at her.

  Ginnie said, “Have you been crying?” She came all the way into the office. “You poor baby!” She crouched awkwardly and gave Susan a clumsy hug that reminded her of Gerard and the way he had so often held her back in the good old days — with a great deal of passion and an endearing lack of natural grace.

  Susan was blinded to everything but her grief and rage. She hurled a box of tissues at the wall, cursed and screamed and burst into tears.

  Ginnie Schulman, fresh out of compassion, eased back out of Susan’s cubicle and quietly shut the door.

  Chapter 7

  Mel Dutton ran a few frames through his Nikon, switched from a wide-angle to a 135mm lens and turned to snap several shots of the killer whales.

  They’d been lying low ever since he’d arrived, then suddenly gotten frisky. Maybe they’d spotted the Nikon and smelled a photo op.

  Dutton said, “Hey, Claire?”

  Parker said, “No pictures, Mel.”

  “Wait a minute, don’t be so negative. Check out the crime scene, look what we’ve got. Mist rising off the pool, a totally naked corpse, all this wonderful snow. A couple of photogenic homicide cops…”

  “Count me out,” said Willows.

  “I shoot high contrast black and white film, two or three rolls max, were looking, I guarantee it, at the next cover of McLeans magazine.”

  Parker said, “You take my picture, Mel, I’ll stuff your camera down your throat.” She smiled sweetly. “I guarantee it.”

  Dutton winked at Willows — or maybe he suffered from a nervous twitch. “No repressed coppers on the homicide squad, huh?”

  Parker gave him a cool look. Six weeks earlier she’d arrived at the scene of a Kingsway shoot-out in time to watch Dutton, armed only with a remarkably insincere grin and a stale-dated pack of Camel filter cigarettes, con a coked-up teenage gang-leader into posing, white-hunter style, next to the three totally dead teenage gangsters he’d just clipped with his Uzi.

  At least a dozen cops had made damn sure the Uzi was out of ammunition, and then Dutton had handed it back to the kid, lit his Camel for him and stuck it in his mouth, used crude sign language and the simple but effective expedient of physically manipulating him into position; made him kneel with the Uzi clutched in his blood-spattered hands close behind the bullet-riddled corpses of his victims.

  In the colourful snaps that resulted, the killer looked like a turn-of-the-century big-game hunter who’d gotten turned around in the high grass and accidentally popped a few bearers, instead of a lion or two.

  Dutton took the sheaf of photographs to the crown prosecutor assigned to the case. The guy stuffed the pictures in his battered briefcase but didn’t use them in court, possibly because the gang-leader pled guilty on three counts of first degree. When Dutton’s request that his work be returned forthwith was ignored, he sent the prosecutor a double-registered letter containing a government pamphlet on copyright law for the layman and swore on his mother’s grave never voluntarily to submit evidence to the crown ever again.

  But ever since the Kingsway shoot-out, Dutton had been working hard to promote what he liked to call his Crooks and Cops with Corpses series. In his zeal he was so aggressively persistent that plenty of normally easy-going cops had turned against him.

  When Dutton propositioned Parker, she immediately went on the defensive, assumed he was going to pressure her to — for example — strip to her bra and panties and shoulder holster, jump on a killer whale and do a few quick laps around the pool.

  Dutton caught the look in Parker’s eyes. He had no idea what she was thinking, but could see it wasn’t good. He raised his hands in a gesture of submission, and went back to photographing the crime scene environs.

  Willows had been examining the many abrasions and scrapes on Gerard Roth’s body. There were a number of deep wounds that appeared to be bite marks. He shared a little of the horror Roth must have endured and then, with an effort, clamped down on his imagination.

  Light glinted on a disc of silver. Willows turned and saw the medical examiner, Bailey ‘Popeye’ Rowland making his way slowly and deliberately down the pebbled concrete steps towards the pool. It was Popeye’s monocle that had caught the light. Above the monocle he wore a black trilby pulled down so low on his oversized head that it bent his ears double. His salt-and-pepper eyebrows were so thick they had to be clipped back like
hedges, and his wiry beard overflowed his face like ivy run wild.

  Popeye’s fondness for anything alcoholic was the stuff of legends. He was a booze-hound fit to roam the Baskervilles. Where his flesh was visible, it was dominated by burst capillaries and resembled a roadmap of hell. He claimed his glass eye had been hand-forged by Spanish artisans from a molten drop of the very best German crystal. The iris was blue as the Mediterranean and the pupil was a small stylized red heart that looked like a valentine candy. Popeye had used the eye many times to horrify unpleasant children or play marbles with his nieces and nephews.

  Occasionally, when he was extremely nervous, he would remove the eye from its socket and roll it about in the palm of his hand while making metallic clicking sounds with his tongue. At bedtime he thoroughly washed the eye in contact lens solution and then stored it for the night in an old matchbox. His good eye, the one that worked, was a fuzzy black ball that looked as if it had been recently rolled in coal dust.

  Strangers often confused the two eyes, good and bad, and concentrated on the wrong one. When this happened he was always considerably cheered. Over his protruding belly he wore a bulky overcoat, dull grey flecked with black, that was a full two sizes too large. He’d paid heavily to have the sleeves shortened and extra padding stuffed into the shoulders. When he wore the coat he looked almost exactly as wide as he was tall, and when he planted his feet and stood erect, he looked solid as a lump of granite: as if he’d been there forever.

  Beneath the overcoat Popeye wore an expensive teal-blue cashmere sweater, and beneath the sweater a custom-tailored sleeveless vest of Kevlar body armour. Beneath the Kevlar, which he found a little stiff and scratchy, he wore a hot-pink silk shirt.

  Some cops wore Kevlar but most didn’t. As far as Willows knew, Popeye was the only ME who sported a bulletproof vest. He’d been wearing the miracle fabric ever since a stone-dead bank robber had sat up in the middle of being audited, spat out Popeye’s thermometer and stuck the foot-long muzzle of a stainless steel Colt Python .357 Magnum up against his heart and pulled the trigger. The Python’s hammer dropped on a spent cap and the perp was promptly and enthusiastically shot considerably deader by a frustrated traffic cop. Even so, it had been a premium negative experience. Popeye was guilty of a certain amount of self-inflicted kidney and lung damage, but aside from that, he liked to think of himself as the kind of guy who could learn from his mistakes.

  So he bought the Kevlar vest and a pair of boxer shorts as well, and wore them faithfully.

  Willows watched Popeye make his way down the wide concrete steps to the pool. Popeye’s baggy black pants dragged at the heels of his ill-fitting, scuffed brown shoes. To confuse the issue of his sobriety or lack of it, the ME had developed a style of walking that owed a lot to Charlie Chaplin.

  Popeye made it to the bottom of the steps. He put down his black bag in order to shake hands with Parker and Willows. His breath smelled strongly of tuna fish. He peered down at Gerard Roth for a long moment. A mischievous grin took hold of his moustache and twisted it hard.

  “Don’t tell me what happened — lemme guess. The whales went after him and in his frantic attempt to get away he swam so hard his leg fell off.”

  “Not exactly,” said Willows.

  “We figure centrifugal force was the culprit,” explained Parker.

  Popeye lifted an eyebrow. The monocle fell into the open palm of his hand. He blew on the glass and rubbed it against his overcoat, screwed it back in place. He peered hard at Parker. “Mind if I smoke, darlin’?”

  Parker smiled sweetly down at him. “Do whatever you like, Doc. Go ahead and burst into flames, if it makes you happy.”

  Popeye lit a cigarette. He’d started smoking the day the dead bank robber had pulled the trigger on him, and now he was hooked. But what the hell, at least he enjoyed it. Drinking was best, of course. But smoking came in a close second. Wasn’t vice a euphemism for pleasure? He unzipped his black bag, found his digital thermometer and wedged the instrument under Dr Roth’s armpit.

  The largest of the whales, Bjossa, surfaced right at the edge of the pool. The huge mammal cleared its blowhole, spraying them with a fine, cool mist.

  Popeye said, “He’s pissed off. He wants his toy back.”

  The thermometer made a shrill beeping sound, a whine of complaint, perhaps. As if there was something about Roth’s armpit that it didn’t like, and it wanted out of there pronto.

  Popeye carefully removed the instrument. He held it up in front of his face. Cigarette smoke drifted into his functioning eye but he didn’t seem to notice. He studied the thermometer for a very long time and then snorted loudly and said, “You want it in Celsius or Fahrenheit?”

  “Celsius,” said Parker in the same moment that Willows asked for the readout in Fahrenheit.

  “He’s twenty degrees Celsius,” said Popeye. “About seventy-two Fahrenheit. Either way you add it up he’s deader than an ice cube.”

  “No chance of suspended animation?” asked Willows.

  “He’s dead, Jack.” Popeye took another pull on his cigarette. “Look on the bright side — at least you don’t have to try to resuscitate him.” He flipped the cigarette butt in the pool, knelt and fished around in his bag until he found a small rectangle of cardboard with a reinforced hole punched in one end and a short length of twine attached.

  “Got a pen?”

  “Not until you give the last one back,” Parker said firmly. Willows offered his ballpoint. Popeye printed the date on the card in large block letters. “Got a case number?”

  “Ninety-three dash three-niner.”

  “What’s his name? And don’t tell me Mark Spitz.”

  “Gerard Roth.”

  “Spell that for me, Jack.”

  Popeye wrote it all down, initialled the tag and used the twine to fasten it securely to the big toe on Roth’s only foot. He zipped his bag. “For the record, in my professional opinion Mr Roth has earned a free one-way ticket to the morgue.” As if playing a miniature piano, he lightly ran his fingers across the pale wrinkled toes of Roth’s left foot. “These little piggies all going to market. Want me to call the ghoul patrol?”

  “Got to wait for Ident, Popeye.” The ME nodded dolefully, and turned away. Willows clutched his arm. “There is one small thing you can do for me, though.”

  “Name it, Jack.”

  “Gimme back my pen.”

  Willows went for coffee. When he returned the crime scene was being methodically searched by a team of crime scene technicians in baggy white one-piece coveralls, clear plastic shower caps and disposable slippers. Willows was reminded of the outfit he’d worn in the delivery room, when Annie and Sean were born.

  One of the techs, a thin, dark man named Troy Hull, who for unknown reasons insisted on wearing a shower cap even though he’d been balder than a snake since his twentieth birthday, asked Willows if he had any explanation for the tracks in the snow and frozen slush.

  Willows said, “Yeah, it looks to me as if he was pushed down to the pool on a dolly.”

  Hull’s clawed fingers made parallel red streaks on his skull as he scratched himself through the shower cap. “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

  Willows said, “On the other hand, there could be any number of reasons somebody might wheel a dolly down to the pool. So let’s not make any assumptions, okay?”

  Hull said, “I already thought of that, too.” His latex-gloved hands made tiny squeaking sounds as he briskly rubbed them together. “Cold, huh?”

  Willows said, “Yeah? I hadn’t noticed.”

  Hull’s eyes lit up and then he realized he was being kidded. He turned and spat, then said, “You finished?”

  Willows said, “Claire?”

  Parker nodded.

  A few minutes later they watched in silence as Dr Gerard Roth and his detached leg were zipped into a dark green plastic body-bag, lifted on to a gurney and wheeled away.

  Willows said, “Now what? Sweeting?”


  “He can wait. Let’s see what goes on around here at night.” A whale breached, and idly circled the pool in a counter-clockwise direction. Parker kicked a chunk of loose ice into the pool. She said, “I hope he isn’t our only witness. How do you cross-examine seven tons of blubber?”

  “Or find the right size handcuffs,” said Willows, “if he decides to cop a plea?” He checked his watch. “You happen to notice if Troy took a water sample from the pool?”

  Parker said, “While you were gone for coffee. I never did get my change back, by the way.”

  Willows said, “Double or nothing — will the water in Roth’s lungs match the water from the whale pool — assuming he drowned?”

  “You think he was already dead when he went for his swim?”

  “Ask me after the autopsy.”

  *

  The head of security, Robert Kelly, was an intense six-footer, the kind of man who had a hard time staying still. Kelly’s black hair was combed straight back from his steeply sloped forehead. His eyes were large and dark. His wrists and the backs of his hands were shaded with coarse black hair. He ushered Willows and Parker into his cramped office and, his crowns flashing gold, volunteered that Gerard Roth’s death was an untimely tragedy.

  Willows hadn’t heard that one before. Untimely tragedy. He said, “Tell us about the security, Bob. Got any?”

  “Are you kidding? Know what a nightmare is? A dead whale floating in a pool full of diluted arsenic, or a live one cruising around in a bubble bath. Can’t strip-search your customers, Detective. Especially if they’re from out of town. So we do the best we can with what we’ve got. Which is plenty. Round-the-clock security in the form of rotating four-man shifts of the very best personnel that money and a top-notch dental plan can buy.”