Carlucci's Edge

by Richard Paul Russo

  “We talked about the mayor’s nephew.”

  Monk laughed. “You talked about Chick Roberts. No, I could never prove it, but I know you talked about Chick Roberts. You later called Paula Asgard, told her you checked into the case, that it was dead-ended, and that she should forget about it.”

  “Yes,” Carlucci said. “The case was a dead end.”

  “The case was being buried.”

  “That’s your interpretation.”

  “Yours, too,” Monk insisted. “You told the girlfriend to forget about it, but you didn’t, did you? You’ve been investigating it on your own, haven’t you?”

  “No,” Carlucci said, trying to remain calm and assured. “I let it go. It wasn’t my case.”

  Monk shook his head. “No, no, no, Lieutenant Carlucci. You kept investigating, you discovered that the Chick Roberts case is connected to William Kashen’s.”

  “It is?”

  Monk sighed heavily. “This obstinance does not help the session,” he said. “We make far better progress if we work together. If we are completely open and honest.”

  “What a crock,” Carlucci said. “This is supposed to be my interrogation, my investigation.”

  “You think so?” Monk said, smiling.

  “What the hell are you after?”

  Monk slowly shook his head and lay back on the couch, the bloated limbs and body sliding and shifting. Carlucci wished he could see the thing’s eyes, not just those damn goggles. Monk’s fingers flicked across something on the console beside him and the panels turned back, once more obscuring him from view. The panels weren’t in exactly the same position, though, and Carlucci could see a strip of his body, another of his neck and face. He wondered if it was intentional. He watched Monk’s gloved fingers pull some of the coating away from his neck, the fingers of his other hand applying a series of dermal patches to the bare skin. Then the coating was worked back.

  “I’m just trying to help you,” Monk eventually said. “Then tell me, what’s the connection between the Chick Roberts and the William Kashen killings?”

  “The mayor wants them both buried,” Monk said. “That’s a hell of a connection.”

  “I don’t know that that’s true.”

  “It’s true. You know it’s true.”

  Carlucci rubbed at his eyes, his temple. He felt like the entire interrogation had gotten away from him. He didn’t know what questions to ask. “What else?” he finally said. “What’s the real connection?” When Monk did not immediately reply, Carlucci said, “What the hell is all this about? Why are these people killing each other? What is at stake here?”

  Nothing from Monk. Gloved fingers tapped at the console. What was he doing? His head shifted, goggles and helmet, staring at something.

  “The spikehead might have known,” Monk said. “But the spikehead is dead.”

  “Mixer,” Carlucci said.

  “Yes, Mixer. There’s the connection to the Saints.”

  “I don’t understand,” Carlucci said, though he understood perfectly well. “Mixer’s dead?”

  “The Saints put him on trial. And he died. They killed him. Yes, Mixer’s dead.”

  So the slug didn’t know everything. Carlucci wanted to tell him, wanted to rub that freakish face in it, but he said nothing. “Why was Chick Roberts killed?” he asked.

  “I don’t have the answer to that, either,” Monk said. Again, Carlucci felt certain the slug was lying. He wanted to order all the feeds sent to one of the other slugs, and set up another session, see if one of the other slugs would be able to give him something else, but he knew it was impossible. That would be pushing the mayor too far. He wished he understood where Monk stood in all this. There was something crucial there, something Carlucci didn’t know.

  He picked up his coffee, started to drink it, but it was lukewarm. A bad temperature. What had Monk given him so far? Nothing. A couple of small things. Butler’s murder as diversion. Something about this longer life stuff. Nothing particularly useful, not even in a cryptic way. The entire session had gone nothing like Brendan had led him to expect. Monk had been far more active, far more aggressive, than he would ever have guessed.

  “Why did you decide to become a slug?” he asked Monk.

  No answer. Panels moved, revealing Monk again, and he gave that twisted, thick-lipped smile. “To get laid,” he said. The panels shifted, cut him completely from view.

  “Do you have any answers?” Carlucci asked.

  “You haven’t asked the right questions. And don’t ask me what the right questions are. If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you.”

  Carlucci pushed the coffee cup away, picked up his notebook, and stared at the questions he’d written, stared at the blank spaces between them.

  “You haven’t given me anything I didn’t already know, or had least guessed at,” Carlucci said. It was a small lie, mostly true. He felt certain Monk had given him a lot of lies, most of them quite big.

  The panels shifted, revealing Monk’s face and one arm.

  “I’ll clue you on something,” Monk said. “A big secret.” He paused, as though unsure whether or not to continue. “You think we’re here for you, don’t you? That we slugs are ensconced here in this building for you, pumping ourselves full of reason enhancers and metabolic juicers, deforming our bodies so we can help you solve difficult cases.” Monk shook his head, smiling again. “You are here for us!”

  Monk pushed himself up, reached behind the couch, and pulled out his canes. “The session is over,” he said. He punched something into the console and the panels all began turning again, shifting back and forth as Monk worked up to his feet. Then he lurched away from the couch and headed toward the back of the room. Carlucci kept waiting for him to stop and turn around to say one more thing, take one more shot, but he never did. Monk staggered through the information center, around a corner, and was gone from sight. Then all but two small lights went out, and the room was filled with shifting, leaping shadows.

  Carlucci stood, picked up his notebook. He watched the whipping, slashing shadows for a minute, then turned and walked toward the door. As he reached for the handle, he heard an echoing whisper roll through the air. He couldn’t be certain, but he thought the whisper said, “Your life, Carlucci.” Carlucci waited, but there was nothing else. He pulled the door open and left.

  TWENTY-THREE

  PAULA ALMOST MISSED it. Of course, she hadn’t been looking for it. She hadn’t been looking for anything.

  It was close to midnight, and she’d just come home after closing up at the Lumiere. Once again, when she walked into her apartment and turned on the light, she stared at the stacks of Chick’s things, thinking she had to do something with them. But not tonight. She was too damn tired.

  She did open one of the boxes filled with Chick’s home-studio discs, some of them just audio, some with video as well. Flipping through the cases, she took out one called Aphasia Sciatica, which she didn’t recognize. She brought it into the bedroom, powered up system and monitor, put the disc into the player, and sat back in her overstuffed chair to watch.

  The disc was filled with speeded-out images of what appeared to be neural surgery, both brain and spinal, backed by lots of atonal screeching industrial music. Twenty minutes into the disc Paula was starting to nod off, kind of bored by the whole thing, when there was a brief blip in the picture and sound. She kept watching for a few moments; then her head jerked and she sat up, realizing something odd had happened. She grabbed the remote and stopped the disc, freeze-framingon the image of a hunchbacked woman, spinal cord exposed, her head twisted around, mouth open, eyes wide and staring at metal strands emerging from her spine. Paula reversed the playback, saw the electrified metal strands whipping about, coiling and uncoiling from the woman’s spine as she silently screamed. The blip came and went again. Stop, then play, slow motion now. The blip was longer this time, a clean break in the video. Back again, frame advance, then freeze the blip.

  On the screen
was an incredibly complex, detailed drawing, something like the interior topography of a huge insect. At the top of the screen, above a line of ideographs, were the words part three. On both sides of the drawing were columns of dense, tiny text, all ideographs. She guessed the ideographs were Chinese. Not because she knew Chinese, but because she suspected New Hong Kong. Paula dropped to her knees and crawled forward, studying the text, but there was no other English anywhere. Was this what Chick had died for?

  Paula got back in the chair and let the disc play at normal speed again. She watched intently for another fifteen minutes, listening carefully to the soundtrack, but there were no other breaks in either the audio or the video on the rest of the disc.

  When it ended, Paula stared at the empty blue screen, thinking. “Part Three”sure as hell implied at least two other parts. Where were they? On other discs, of course. They had to be. But which ones? Or were the others taken when Chick was killed? But if they were, how was this one missed?

  She went back into the front room, took another of Chick’s homemade discs from the box, brought it into the bedroom, and popped it on. She watched it carefully, but when it ended half an hour later, she’d found nothing.

  She returned to the front room and stared at the boxes and crates. There were hundreds of discs and tapes in various formats, some commercial, others homemade by Chick or other people. If there were more parts to this, how could she possibly find them without spending weeks searching through everything? She tried to think like Chick, tried to put herself in his place and figure out how he would have decided which discs or tapes to put this stuff on, figure out a key, but she quickly realized it was absurd. There was no way to find the other pieces without going through everything, disc by disc, tape by tape. And she’d need help for that.

  Then what? Even if she found all the parts to whatever this was, what then? What the hell would she do with it? Who could she take it to? Carlucci? He was digging into Chick’s death, he was a cop, a good cop. That made a kind of sense.

  Tremaine? He was doing this story, he was trying to find answers, too. No, not Tremaine. She didn’t know him well enough yet, didn’t know what kind of trust she could put in him. And Carlucci, she wasn’t sure about him either, for some reason. There were too many funny things with the cops and Chick.

  Mixer.

  She went into the bedroom, put the Aphasia Sciatica disc in its case. Mixer was the only person she trusted completely.

  One in the morning. But Mixer was in the Tenderloin, and in there it was Prime Time. Paula put on her jacket, put the disc in one of the inner pockets, and left.

  The Euro Quarter was chaos. A train of Caged Men crawled through the streets, completely jamming up traffic. Chicken-wire cages on wheels were pulled by women in crash suits, two cables over each shoulder, two women to a cage. Inside each cage was a squatting, naked man, fingers gripping the chicken-wire walls. There must have been thirty cages in the train. Thumping drum music pounded from speakers in each cage. The men yelped, they scratched their genitals, they grinned. The women pulling the cages were faceless, features hidden by masks of bone. Horns and sirens blared in futile frustration; if anyone actually tried to get the Caged Men off the street, the women would start shooting.

  Movement on the sidewalks wasn’t much better. Paula didn’t fight the crowds; she moved along with them as they shifted around the Caged Men and the string of dancing foot-followers in their wake. Everyone seemed angry. Paula ducked into Mr. Pink’s Bookstop, just to get out of the crush. She hated Mr. Pink’s. Perv heaven. Pom never seemed to change much. Paula wandered among the shelves, ignoring the stares of the men, the snickers of other women. How did they know? The cover photos on books and magazines made her queasy; she tried not to look at them, but as she walked along they kept clutching at her gaze. Finally, deciding this was worse than the crush outside, she pushed her way out of the store.

  Ten minutes later, the crush eased as the last of the Caged Men rolled past. Paula was sweating, still feeling a little sick from Mr. Pink’s. She had to make way for a band of the Daughters of Zion. They were obviously on the prowl, probably hoping to run into a pack of Heydrich’s Fists and have a bang-out. Blood and gore and smashed faces. Great.

  Eventually Paula found the alley Mixer had directed her to. Not quite as crowded, but hardly empty. Three or four drum fires burned; several people clustered around one, roasting an unrecognizable animal on a spit. A family of Screamers lurched past, two adults and two children all bound together at the wrists and ankles with rope. Paula located the door, pressed the intercom. There was a burst of static, which immediately cleared. “Yes?” A neutral voice, could have been a man or a woman.

  “Paula Asgard,” she said. “I’m here to see...” She caught herself. “To see Minor Danzig.”

  A long pause, then, “Wait.” Another burst of static, then dead air.

  “Wait for what?”

  No response.

  Paula waited, staring at the door. Were they trying to check her out? There were no windows in the door, nothing that looked like a screener. She looked up the wall, but didn’t see anyone looking down at her.

  “Paula.”

  The voice came from behind her. She turned to see Mixer smiling.

  “Just had to make sure,” he said. “Paranoia’s our survival strategy right now.” He came forward, kissed her cheek, then banged twice on the door. The door swung open, and a tall, stunning woman in long, blood-red robes stepped aside to let them in. The woman closed the door behind them and secured it.

  “Paula, this is Saint Katherine. Paula Asgard.”

  St. Katherine smiled, took Paula’s hand. Her fingers were smooth and warm; Paula had expected them to be cold.

  “Why are you here?” Mixer asked.

  Paula looked at St. Katherine. She didn’t know this woman at all. She didn’t care if St. Katherine had saved Mixer’s life. But she felt awkward saying anything. No, not just awkward. Almost afraid. This was the woman who had nearly killed Mixer, who had killed or wrecked others.

  “What is it, Paula?” Mixer said.

  Paula turned back to him. “Can I talk to you alone?” She paused. “It’s about Chick.”

  There was a long silence, Mixer looking at her; almost smiling, Paula thought. She glanced at St. Katherine, who showed no signs of leaving, and no signs of discomfort. There was something here, Paula realized, something she didn’t quite understand, something between Mixer and St. Katherine.

  Finally Mixer shook his head. “Saint Katherine and I are together in all this,” he said. “Chick, the mayor, the mayor’s nephew, all of it.”

  “I don’t know her,” Paula said. She turned to St. Katherine. “I don’t know you. And so I don’t trust you.”

  St. Katherine smiled. “It’s all right. I understand.” But she still did not make a move to leave.

  “Do you trust me?” Mixer asked.

  “I came to you with this. Not Carlucci, not Tremaine,” she said, half wishing now she had gone to Carlucci instead.

  “Then trust Saint Katherine,” Mixer said. “Whatever you tell me, if she wasn’t here, I’d tell her later.”

  Yes, Paula thought, something more had happened between them, something since Mixer had come to see her, telling her he was alive. His doubts and fears about St. Katherine were gone.

  Paula nodded. She trusted Mixer, more than anyone else. She would trust St. Katherine, too. She took the disc from inside her jacket, held it up. “I’ve got something to show you.”

  A basement room, dark except for the colored lights of electronic displays on computers, sound and video systems, communication consoles. Paula sat on a small, hard chair; Mixer and St. Katherine were seated on her right, St. Lucy on her left. They stared at the image on the large-screen monitor. The text was sharp and clear, the ideographs quite beautiful; the diagram was still incomprehensible to Paula.

  “The text is Chinese,” St. Lucy said.

  Paula had met St. Lucy only a
few minutes earlier, but already she liked the woman. St. Lucy seemed so normal, so intelligent and grounded; Paula wondered how she could ever have joined the Saints.

  “You read Chinese?” Paula asked.

  “No. Only a few words and phrases. But I recognize it.”

  “What about the drawing, diagram, whatever the fuck it is?” Mixer asked, leaning forward.

  “It looks medical to me,” St. Katherine said.

  St. Lucy nodded. “To me also. But...” She left it there. Then, “We know someone who should look at the diagram, who might know what it is. And someone who reads Chinese. Unfortunately, not the same person.” She turned to Paula and smiled, shrugging gently.

  “We need to go through all of Chick’s tapes and discs,” Mixer said. “You still have them?” he asked Paula. “You didn’t sell or give any of them away?”

  “No. Other things, yeah, but I kept all the music and video. I wanted to go through it, decide what to keep. Which probably would have been most of it. But...” Here was one of the things that bothered her. “If this is what Chick was killed over, why is it still here? Why didn’t they take everything of Chick’s when they killed him?”

  “I wonder, too,” Mixer said, “but I can make some guesses. Chick had this stuff, which he was trying to sell. Diagrams and text, apparently. Something big. Maybe we’ll find out what. He found it by accident, or stole it.” Mixer grinned in the light of the displays. “We know which was more likely. Now, Chick’s not too smart, but he’s not completely stupid, either. So he makes an extra copy, splitting it up and scattering the pieces around in his discs. When somebody comes after him, he’s still got the original to hand over, trying to save his ass. But they kill him anyway.” Mixer sighed. “So what do they do? They’ve got what they came for. They don’t know if there’s another copy. Hauling everything out of that place would take a lot of time and be damn conspicuous, and remember, this is a murder that’s being buried, someone’s trying to keep it quiet. And probably the original was in some encrypted format that would be damn hard to copy into readable text like this,” he said, pointing at the screen. “But you know Chick, he was a fucking wizard with that kind of stuff. Looking at him, though, you’d never have a clue.” Mixer shrugged. “Hell, it’s all a guess. But we’ve got to look through everything and see if there’s more.”