Lunatic City

by T. Allen Diaz

  I let out an irritated gasp and shook my head. She had managed to say they were investigating Rick’s murder with a straight face.

  Wendell kicked me, and Bates stopped to glare. I held her gaze and tried not to scowl too much. I couldn’t say how successful I was.

  “He attempted to apprehend a suspect while off duty, assaulting two bouncers at a local night club in the process. The night club was under surveillance. Undercover officers were in the building at the time. Detective Parker’s recklessness not only endangered the lives of his fellow officers in the bar, but he also ruined a long investigation that has now been set back months, if not years.”

  Tsaris was staring a hole in me. Rodson just eyeballed the wall behind me.

  Wendell nodded. “Isn’t it common for police officers, especially detectives, to work long and arduous hours?”

  “Yes,” said Bates.

  “And don’t they often receive calls and information about ongoing cases while off duty?”

  “It happens.”

  “It happens,” said Wendell. “And don’t you require pReC data to contact your employees off duty?”

  “This is a public safety organization, Mr. Wendell. I hardly see—”

  “Isn’t it, in fact, common practice to pull detectives in on their off days, even when they’re not on call?”

  “Again, it happens.”

  “Do you know how many times your department activated off-duty personnel last year?”

  Bates glanced at the guy from legal sitting next to her. He didn’t seem to have anything to offer. “Not precisely.”

  “Well,” said Wendell, “I do know precisely: forty-seven times in 2251 alone.”

  “That’s hardly the same thi—”

  “This incident where my client allegedly assaulted these—what did you call them—bouncers? Why wasn’t he charged?”

  Bates didn’t flinch.

  “Isn’t it true that these men were both known associates of The Lunatics street gang and that both men were armed and were about to cause bodily injury to my client?”

  “He created the situation by going there! He had no business—”

  “Furthermore,” said Wendell, reaching into the accordion file, “isn’t it true that Special Detective Andrew Tsaris accused my client of selling information to The Lunatics street gang in a personnel meeting just two days ago? Didn’t he, in fact, go on to say that he couldn’t prove it in court, but he could take my client’s job?” He tossed the hard copies of the transcripts on the table in front of her. He looked up at Bates. “Is that how you do business, Chief? Find an ulterior way to discipline your employees when you can’t prove them guilty of the things you ‘suspect’?”

  The lawyer leaned into Bates’ ear and whispered. The corner of her mouth turned down.

  Wendell tossed another packet of papers. This one landed in front of the lawyer. “Here, counsellor,” he said. “Motion to cease and desist. We’re putting an end to this witch hunt.”

  Wendell boosted me. We all stood as a unit and left Bates to gawk at our departure. I didn’t speak until we were in the first floor lobby.

  “That was awesome!”

  Wendell looked at me. “Don’t be too excited. Bates was right. Your jacket’s full of discipline and you did ruin an investigation while violating department policy and, maybe, the law. This will slow the wheels, but we’re gonna need more than what we have to save your job. I don’t suppose you have anything?”

  I watched the crowd past Wendell’s shoulder. A pretty young blonde was looking at me. She smiled. I smiled back and returned my attention to Wendell. “I don’t know. I was only looking into Rick’s death because they weren’t.”

  “What do you mean ‘they weren’t’?”

  “They weren’t,” I said. “They assigned it to a sergeant and his partner and kept piling more and more cases on them.”

  “Is that standard procedure?”

  I looked back at the blonde. She was still looking and still smiling. “No. You remember when Glenda Ortiz was killed, four years ago?”

  Wendell was accessing his pReC. “Yeah October—forty-eight.”

  “That sounds right. We created a task force that beat every street corner and every bar and dive until we had her killer.”

  I could tell he was only half-listening. He was absorbing data from the pReC. Wendell and Gordon shared a look. “Thanks, detective,” he said. “We have to go.”

  They were only halfway to the exit when the blonde girl walked up to me. “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  “You Francis Derrik Parker?”

  The smile fell from my face. “What? Yes, but how’d you?”

  “Consider yourself served.” She handed me a paper packet. My pReC flashed a message. The Office of Patricia Stanley Esquire headed the message. My good mood was shattered.

  I turned to leave, but Tsaris stood in my path. “You think you won something today, Parker? You think this is gonna get your job back? You’ve just given me more to look into. That ain’t no union lawyer there. How much of your soul did that devil cost you?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Well, I’m making it my personal mission to find out. And when I do, your job might be the least of your worries!”

  He stalked off and left me with a lot to think about.

  CHAPTER X

  I left City Hall and went straight to a bar called On the Border. It was a cop bar. I could have chosen better. The quiet murmur of conversation stopped, and all eyes looked at me. They didn’t like what they saw, but I didn’t care. I chose a booth that faced the rest of the room.

  Sheila came by my table. She was nice enough. “Hey, Park, what can I get you?”

  I looked past her toned legs and flat belly. “Rum. Make it a double.”

  She was back in minutes. I glanced at the bar. Daggers stared back. I held my drink up and sipped it. I wondered if they’d tampered with it. It wouldn’t have surprised me: I wasn’t very popular at the precinct these days.

  I was halfway through the drink, but not nearly far enough into soothing my wounded pride to stop. I was thinking about the girl from City Hall and how she’d played me with that pretty smile of hers. I thought about the girl from the roof top and her accomplice. There was something about her. She was a professional, but what was her angle?

  I had told Allyssa that the girl didn’t seem like a corporate PI. It was a little of everything, but it was how similar she was to me. The burglary tools, the bag, hell, even the probe screamed low budget. She was putting this together with very little money. So that made her some kind of small fry detective.

  That should make her easy to find. I finished my drink and started accessing my pReC. It was more daunting than I thought, and by the time I’d drunk my fourth double, I was pretty sure that I’d reached a dead end. I leaned against the wall to keep the room from spinning.

  I’m not sure who started it. I think it was the guy from Eleventh Precinct, but I’m known to be a pretty mean drunk, and my mood wasn’t great to start with. I was an accomplished fighter. Rick and I had been in more than one together. Problem was, I was falling down drunk, and he had three friends. I remember fists and shoes and one pool cue.

  I was still lying on my back when Dana walked into the room. I heard Harry the bar owner tell her the drinks were on the house as long as I promised to never return. I tried to lift my head but it swirled. Whether it was from the alcohol or the ass-whipping was anyone’s guess. I put my head back down.

  “Frank!” she said. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  I tried to look at her, but my stomach lurched. I put my head back on the floor and closed my eyes. The room was still spinning, and I knew what that meant. I rolled over and puked all over the floor.

  “Jesus Christ!” It was Harry. I’m sure h
e did more cursing, but I was busy regurgitating his rum.

  I rolled onto my back again. Dana was standing over me, her face wrinkled in disgust. “Don’t lay in it, Frank!” She turned her head. “Dammit!”

  *******

  I woke up naked in my bed. The room swayed back and forth. My bladder screamed for me to get to a toilet. I staggered to the water closet. An angry monkey pounded the inside of my head while his brother was turning cartwheels in my stomach. I was just able to drain my bladder before I plunged my face into the toilet and began to retch.

  Nothing came up. I flushed and slumped to the floor. The cold tile felt good on my face. It didn’t stop the monkeys, but it took the edge off of their wrath.

  “You ok, Frank?”

  I jumped, angering the monkeys again. I tried to protect my modesty. “Shit, Dana! The hell are you doing here?”

  She laughed at me. “Who the hell do you think got you home, Andy Tsaris?”

  She turned and walked back into the living room. “And I wouldn’t worry too much about covering up. Who do you think washed the vomit off of you?”

  It took me a few minutes to stagger out of the bathroom. I’d wrapped a hand towel around my waist. “Thanks for the help.” I rubbed a knot on my head. My left eye wasn’t swollen shut, but it was sure to be black. My lower lip was swollen and a painful cut rubbed my teeth. I massaged it with my tongue.

  “It was a crew from the Eleventh Precinct. Harry said they worked you over pretty good.”

  I didn’t need Harry to tell me that. “Thanks for having my back.”

  “You know who else helped you?”

  I studied her face. “Captain Rod?”

  She laughed. “Nope, close. Ken Schoaler.”

  My stomach would have turned had it not already been doing cartwheels.

  “I told him you were one of ours and, as his partner, I was calling in a solid.”

  “Great,” I said. “Nothing makes me feel better than owing Ken Schoaler a ‘solid’.”

  She laughed again and handed me a drink. “Here, my special elixir. It won’t do much for your face, but it’s perfect for hangovers.”

  I took the glass. “I thought you were a teetotaler.”

  Her smile was sad. “Not always.”

  I moved to sit on the couch.

  She took a chair.

  We sat in silence for what seemed like hours.

  “How are you, Frank?”

  I had been dozing. “I’m ok.”

  “I’m sorry I was a bitch to you the other day. You know, about working for Katsaros.”

  I smiled and gave a weak nod. I was already hurting less.

  She let a few minutes pass before speaking again. “What are you gonna do?”

  “I’ve gotta find this girl. She’s in a lot of trouble, and I’m not the only one looking for her.”

  I told her about the party, the video, and the girl on the rooftop.

  “Jesus,” said Dana. “She has to be in the crosshairs of half a dozen of the most powerful men in the city.”

  “Katsaros would be a fool to tell them about the video.”

  “Maybe they have other ways of knowing.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe.”

  The picture should have been getting clearer, but it was just getting bigger.

  That’s when I remembered. “She knew me!”

  “What? Who?”

  “The girl from the rooftop.” I stood and walked to the kitchen. It made me a little woozy, but I couldn’t sit still. “She recognized me when she saw my face.”

  “Well, maybe she sized up the competition ahead of time. PIs and wannabe bounty hunters are prone to do that, you know.”

  I stared off into the kitchen. Something about that felt wrong. “She was surprised.”

  “Surprised?”

  “Yeah,” my investigator brain was really moving now. “Yeah. She didn’t know who she was tracking. She didn’t know it was me. She was just following someone who—what?”

  “You said you noticed her outside Moss’ workplace?”

  “Yeah, but she followed me there. Who knows where she picked me up?”

  “You went to The Olympian?”

  “Yeah.”

  Dana raised her eyebrows and let me fill in the blanks.

  “I don’t know, Dana. It’s a big, crowded place.”

  “You said you went to talk to Katsaros?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So, did you walk in there in that typical subtle way you do?”

  I smiled. It was the only answer she needed.

  “So you stuck out like a sore thumb and had a confrontation with their security, but you wonder how she came to pick you up?”

  My face twisted in thought. That sounded like something resembling plausible. “It still doesn’t tell us who she is or what the hell she was doing there, or how the hell she knew me on sight.”

  “A moonlighting badge.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Doesn’t feel right. The way she talked. The way she acted.”

  “You said she was trained. Maybe an academy washout?”

  “She seemed too competent to have washed out of the academy.”

  “People get thrown out for more than incompetence, you know.”

  She was right. “I think we need to come up with a plan for gathering more info before we can come up with any concrete theories.”

  “So, where are you headed now?”

  “Me? What about us?”

  She smiled and stood from the couch. “I came to help a friend who’d gotten his ass beat make it home in one piece. I brought you home, washed sour vomit off of you, and even gave you a little hair of the dog to help you on your feet. You’re on your own from here.”

  I hated to see her go. “Ok. Tell that asshole Schoaler I said thanks.”

  She stopped and smiled over her shoulder. “Un-uh, you tell him yourself. It really is the least you can do.”

  I growled but didn’t dispute her wisdom.

  She winked. “Take care of yourself, Frank. I might not be available next time you take on a whole precinct.”

  She turned and was gone.

  I leaned over the counter for several long minutes, trying to figure out what I could do next. Everything seemed to go nowhere: the Moss boy was a literal dead end. And, while the dirty secrets of Tycho’s elite might seem a good starting place, I had no leverage. Interviewing peripheral witnesses in the slim hope of finding someone who would give me something on these players would take hundreds, if not thousands, of man-hours. I didn’t have an army of investigators to hit every servant, bell hop, and call girl in The Upper City. I also didn’t have the weight of a real badge to influence the thinking of people who might have good reason to remain tight-lipped. No, I would have to come at this another way.

  I got off the counter and forced myself to straighten the house. It wasn’t easy. The monkeys took great exception, but it had to be done and I needed to move or I’d stay in bed all day.

  Dana didn’t wear strong perfume, but I could smell it in the air. The linens from the guest room needed washing. So did my sheets. I put them in the basket and dropped them in the washer down the hall. I cleaned the toilet and the sheets. The vomit-soaked clothes went into the incinerator chute.

  I changed the laundry, came back, and did the kitchen. The floor didn’t really need cleaning, but I swept and mopped, anyway. I was just spraying Suzanne’s perfume into the air when I remembered the hard copies Simon had given me while I was at The Olympian, and the load of clothes tumbling in the washer.

  I rushed to the bedroom and breathed a sigh of relief: my clothes from that day were still in the hamper. I pulled them out. The pics were small and grainy. It seemed a farce that this was the best they could do. I was happy that the pics
were close-up face shots. The last thing I wanted was to peruse these men in all their naked glory.

  There were almost a dozen, more than I wanted to think about. I figured there might be two or three more who’d been withheld as good loyal customers above suspicion. Each man had some info: estimated height, hair and eye color. Only one man paid with a traceable card. He was a loner who, according to Simon’s dossier, lived the life of a recluse on the top floor of one of the nicer apartment buildings in the city.

  I was on the downhill slope when a face jumped out at me: bronze skin and sandy hair. A sour-looking scowl took the place of the plastic smile I’d last seen on that face, and one of his eyes was swollen, but there was no mistaking the features. It was the face from the lobby of ManaTech!

  I left in such a hurry I forgot my linen in the dryer.

  CHAPTER XI

  The AI had assumed the look of a woman with mahogany skin and pink hair. It still had that plastic salesman smile. Must’ve been a glitch in the programming. Either that, or an inside joke. Knowing programmers the way I did, I’d bet the latter.

  Jessica Kingsley met me in the lobby. So did a pair of security guards.

  “Mr. Parker.” There was none of her good-natured sorrow. “You didn’t tell me that you were an ex-cop.”

  I could have pointed out that she didn’t ask, but I was going to have precious little time to get anything useful out of this encounter. I pointed at the AI drifting above the pedestal. Its smile seemed absurd, given the situation. “Do all of your employees get a chance to model their fa—?”

  “Get out! Now! I decided I wouldn’t report you to your superiors. Don’t make me reconsider.”

  That didn’t leave a lot of room to broach a discussion. It looked like I would have to do this the hard way. It wasn’t the first time. I knew it wouldn’t be the last. I nodded and moved to the door. “Thank you, Miss Kingsley.”

  She was telling the AI to notify the police department the moment I stepped back into the building.

  I walked out and started looking for a good place to kill some time. I found what I was looking for on the opposite end of the ManaTech building. I made a show of walking up the street for any nosey ManaTech security and took a right at the next block. I walked over to the back side of the building I’d spied during my departure. It was, like the rest of The Upper City, nice. Even the diners seemed brighter, cleaner, and shinier. I took a booth by the window and asked for a coffee.