The Immortal Game

by Mark Coggins

  I walked across the lawn on irregularly shaped flagstones to the side of the house where a flight of stairs led up to the door on the second-floor level. The door was painted purple and had a buzzer in the middle. I pressed my elbow against the holstered Glock for reassurance and then leaned on the doorbell. The bell made an interesting mechanical chime, but more interesting still, the door slipped the latch and swung partially open. I nudged the door open further with my foot and called out:

  “Candygram. Candygram for Mr. Nagel.”

  If Nagel was there, he wasn’t answering. He also wasn’t making use of any furniture. With the exception of a half-filled plastic trash bag and a discarded light bulb, the living room I looked into was empty. I stepped inside. The carpet still had depressions from a couch and other furniture, and several logs remained stacked in the grate of the fireplace. A large window at the back of the house looked out on the yard, and beyond that, a green strip of bramble and eventually the beach and the ocean.

  I moved across the room to the adjoining breakfast nook and kitchen. Here there were more signs of recent occupancy-and even more recent departure. There were no pots, pans, or food in the cabinets, but coffee grounds covered the floor, a box of partially eaten donuts sat on the counter, and the refrigerator had a moldering pizza from a popular chain. I went out of the kitchen and down the hallway to the bedrooms. There were two of these, and both were stripped bare. I was just ducking into the bathroom for a look-see when I heard a muffled thumping noise.

  It seemed to come from below and behind me. I slipped the 9mm out of its holster and retraced my steps to a closed hallway door I had bypassed on my way to the bedrooms. The noise was much louder here. I gripped the knob, turned it carefully, pushed the door open. It gave on darkness and a set of concrete steps leading down. I flicked on the light and the thumping noise got louder, more urgent. A kind of strangled bellow joined with it. Going down the steps, I found myself in a utility room at the back of the garage. The room had concrete walls, a concrete floor with a drain, and along one wall were a washer and a dryer. Along another were a metal sink and a tall wooden cabinet. The noises came from the cabinet.

  Aiming the Glock in front of me, I jerked open one of the cabinet doors. Chris Duckworth lay face down on the floor. His hands and feet were hog-tied behind him with a good ten yards of duct tape, and his mouth was taped shut with a strip that ran all the way around his head. He was wearing a gray sweat suit. His eye looked up at me with a wild expression, and he tried to say something through the tape that might have been my name. I said:

  “Don’t get up on my account.”

  He said two words with urgency that probably ended with “you.” My first instinct was to free Duckworth, but I didn’t want to end up in the cabinet next to him, so I told him to hold tight for a minute and went through a door at the back of the utility room that led to the garage. There were no cars, and more importantly, no Todd Nagel lurking in the shadows waiting to jump me from behind. I went back to the utility room, locking the door to the garage behind me.

  I holstered the automatic and fished out the Swiss Army knife I had on my key chain. The little blade from the knife was sharp, but its small size made it hard to put any muscle behind the strokes. I concentrated on the band of tape that held Duckworth’s arms and feet together. When I finally sawed through it, his legs dropped like a wooden dummy’s, knocking over the mop and bucket in the far corner of the cabinet. He groaned through the tape. I freed his hands and feet, then rolled him out of the cabinet onto the concrete floor. He sat up with his legs in front of him, rubbing his hamstrings with hands that shook visibly.

  “I think you better do your mouth,” I said. “Pulling off that tape is going to smart.”

  Duckworth nodded his head in agreement and groped around the ring of tape to find the edge. He picked at it ineffectually until I finally got tired of watching him, brushed his hands away and yanked off a foot or so of tape. This uncovered his mouth, but left the strip that went around the back of his head all too firmly in place.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” he yelped. “I was getting to it, August.”

  “Yeah, and the polar ice caps are melting-but I haven’t bought any water wings.”

  He rubbed his face. “At least I won’t have to wax my mustache for a long while.”

  “How about that. Now, I think you have a bit of explaining to do.”

  He looked down and away. “Yes, I suppose I do,” he said and picked at the tape on his wrist. “Well, I decided you could use some help after all, and I selected Nagel instead of Jodie. I got his address from directory assistance, and then came down here early this morning. I was watching the house from my car at about 7:20 when Nagel came out and started loading stuff into his van. He brought out several loads, then closed the van door like he was finished and went back into the house. With the ‘For Rent’ sign and all, I thought he might be moving and I didn’t want him to get away. So I snuck up the driveway where the van was parked and started letting the air out of his tires. I figured that would slow him up enough for me to call you to come down and apprehend him.”

  “I think you’ve got me confused with Dick Tracy. What were you going to do? Call me on your two-way wrist radio?”

  “Come on, August. This is not a joke.”

  “Bingo. My point exactly.”

  Duckworth looked up at me. “I know what you’re saying. And believe me, I’m never going to do anything like this again.”

  “Glad to hear it. So what happened next?”

  “You can probably guess. I got a little too absorbed in my task, and the next thing I knew, Nagel had come up behind me with a knife the size of a curling iron. He put the blade under my chin and said, ‘What do you think you’re doing, faggot?’ I was petrified. I couldn’t think of a single word to say. Nagel didn’t wait for an answer. He frog-marched me into the garage and through to this room and bound me up with the tape. Then he shut me into the closet and switched off the lights. A little while later, I heard his van start up and I figured he had gone. At that point, I really began to worry. I didn’t know if you or anyone else would come to the house for days. I had horrible cramps in my hamstrings, and I imagined myself starving to death, locked up in that claustrophobic little space. You can’t know how relieved I was when I heard someone walking around upstairs. I think I would have lost my mind if I had stayed there even thirty minutes longer.”

  I felt bad for being flippant earlier. “Sorry,” I said.

  “You know where you find sorry, don’t you?” said Duckworth. “In the dictionary between shit and syphilis. But it’s not your fault. You did your best to warn me off.”

  “Well, don’t take it too hard. It could have just as easily happened to me. What else did Nagel say to you?”

  “Nada. He didn’t seem particularly surprised or angry to find me here, either. He was very efficient and dispassionate. Like he was pulling a tick off his pet dog or something.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “Then here’s an interesting question: how do you think he knew you are a little light in your loafers?”

  “What a sensitive way to phrase it, August. Why did he call me a faggot, is that what you mean? I don’t know. I may be a little fey when I’m not in drag, but most straights don’t pick up on it. Especially when I’m doing something butch like letting the air out of tires. What’s your point?”

  “Just this: Nagel must have already known who you are. Which means that he was following me one of the times you and I met.”

  Duckworth shivered. “Then he knows where I live, and he could come back and do something else to me.”

  “I doubt it. If he were going to do anything particularly nasty, he would have done it when he ran into you here. And he wouldn’t have left you at the house to be found.”

  Duckworth pressed his fists into his eyes and rubbed them. “I suppose. Let’s get going. I don’t want to stay another minute longer.”

  I pulled him to his feet. With the fragmen
ts of duct tape hanging from the back of his head and all four limbs, he looked more than a little ridiculous. “You go ahead and take off. I’m going to nose around a bit more.”

  Duckworth nodded his head, the duct tape fluttering like a kite tail. “Knock yourself out,” he said.

  I walked him out through the garage and watched him get into his car and drive off. He was still a little shaky, but I didn’t think he would have any trouble making it home. I went back inside and dumped the plastic trash bag in the living room onto the floor. It was pretty slim pickings. There were beer cans, a couple of football magazines, a torn tee shirt, bubble wrap, a roll of duct tape with about an eighth of an inch left, and a greasy red and white cardboard bucket with crumbs of fried chicken in it. Donuts, pizza, and now this. Here was a guy who actually ate worse than I. You had to be impressed.

  I went out the front door, down the steps, and through a gate at the side of the house. A strip of concrete had been poured next to the foundation and corded firewood was stacked under the eaves beside a gas barbecue grill covered with a tarp. There was also a large plastic garbage can on wheels. I pulled out the pair of trash bags I found inside and plopped them onto the concrete. They were wet with dew and stunk to high heaven. Using the blade from my penknife, I slit them both open and stirred through the contents with a stick of kindling from the woodpile.

  There was more evidence of Nagel’s fast-food diet, and of a recent oil change: four empty quart containers and a discarded filter. But mixed in amongst the debris of bad meals and auto maintenance were some of the personal papers I was looking for. I found and extracted a soggy credit card bill, several pages from a Pacific Bell phone bill, and a bent manila folder. The folder was of immediate interest as it contained a set of newspaper clippings going back almost ten years-all dealing with the meteoric Silicon Valley career of Edwin J. Bishop. I shoved the bills into the folder with the clippings, and cleaned up the trash as best I could. Then I made another pass through the garage, but didn’t find anything of interest.

  The last thing I did before getting in my car to drive to East Palo Alto was to note down the telephone number written on the rent sign. I hoped that Nagel’s landlord would be more helpful than Terri McCulloch’s had been.

  STATION BREAK

  FOR A COMMUNITY THAT HAD LED THE nation in murders per capita several years running, East Palo Alto’s police station was surprisingly modest. It was shoehorned into the first floor of a stark office building from the mid-seventies that lacked any trappings of municipal pride. There was a McDonald’s directly in front of the building on the corner of University and Bay, and as I came through the drive-up window, I could see the tiny stable of squad cars behind a rolling gate in a fenced section of the parking lot.

  I parked on the far side of the building and sat in the car while I wolfed down my hamburger and coffee. I puzzled over the steady stream of people with books going in and out of the entrance, until I noticed a sign that indicated the East Palo Alto library was also housed here. The night Stockwell had brought me here from the Woodland Avenue apartment house I was taken handcuffed through the prisoners’ entrance at the rear and didn’t have the opportunity or presence of mind to take in such details. I locked up the Galaxie and went through the double glass doors, taking Teller’s laptop computer with me.

  The police department was at the back, past the city council chambers and something called the “Community Room.” I pushed through another glass door with the city emblem on it and walked up to the tiny reception desk. To the right, on the other side of a swinging half door, I could see into the squad room and a maze of partitioned cubicles. A large black woman in uniform sat behind the desk. She was in her mid-thirties and looked like she didn’t put up with any sass. She gave me the kind of stare Hitler would get at a bar mitzvah.

  “August Riordan to see Detective Stockwell,” I said.

  She nodded curtly and picked up the phone. “Lieutenant Stockwell, there’s a Mr. Riordan to see you,” she said. She listened for a moment, nodded, looked back at me. “He says to tell you that I’m to kick your ass through the McDonald’s arches if you don’t clear out of here in thirty seconds.”

  “Tell him it’s not a gag. I really need to see him.”

  She complied with my request and a moment later Stockwell came charging up to the half door from inside the squad room. He was wearing a dress shirt that had been given to him many Christmases ago with the sleeves rolled past his elbows. A striped tie that was narrower than Gentlemen’s Quarterly said it should be this year was knotted loosely around his throat. His hair was disheveled and he had a twisted red plastic coffee stirrer clamped in his teeth. He looked every inch the harried, underpaid cop that he was. “Come on, you,” he said through pursed lips.

  He led me back to a cubicle where you couldn’t swing a thirty-eight-inch baseball bat unless you choked up. There were a couple of metal chairs that seemed even harder than the ones in my office and a scarred wooden desk with all the usual office junk. A picture of a very attractive woman with two cherubic kids stood to one side in a clear plastic frame.

  “You’ve a very handsome family,” I said, trying to soften him up.

  “That’s not my family, you moron. I bought the frame today-the picture came with it.”

  “Oh.”

  He took the plastic stirrer out of his mouth and grimly tied a knot in the middle of it. He pointed with it at me. “I’m going to give you a little lesson in the realities of East Palo Alto police work. And for once, you’re going to shut up and listen.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Yes, I do. I’ll bet you think I’m pleased to be assigned to a high profile case like the Teller killing. I’ll bet you think I’m putting all my time into it expecting to break it big and make myself a name in the department. I’ll bet that’s what you think, huh?”

  “I guess you’re looking for a straight man here, Stockwell. Okay, sure, that’s what I think.”

  “Well, you’re wrong. I wish to God Teller had gotten his ten blocks west in white-bread-with-mayo Palo Alto. I would have dragged his corpse over the line if I thought I could have got away with it. A rich, prominent Silicon Valley executive shot dead in East Palo Alto is the last thing we need. Not here, not now. We already got more than we need. We got drugs on every corner. We got black gangs. We got Latino gangs. We got turf wars, robberies, muggings, knifings, and drive-by shootings with all the trimmings. We got seventeen-year-old hookers propositioning customers while they wait in the McDonald’s drive-through-right in front of the police station. We got bars with blue lights in the bathrooms so the junkies can’t find their veins to shoot up. And we got the rest of the frightened citizenry sleeping in their bathtubs at night so the stray bullets don’t kill them in their sleep. We got all that on the smallest tax base of any city in the area, and as a result, a totally undermanned and under-gunned police force that can’t even afford shotguns in all the patrol cars.”

  “Understaffed,” I said.

  Stockwell looked at me stupidly. “Huh?”

  “You should have said understaffed. Undermanned is not politically correct.”

  Stockwell threw the plastic stirrer at my chest. “Fuck politically correct. Did any of what I just said register with you? Or have you been too occupied monitoring my goddamned word choice?”

  “I get it, Lieutenant. You’re too busy keeping your head above water to make the Teller case a priority.”

  “No,” said Stockwell. “I don’t have a choice about the Teller case. It is a priority. I’ve been told that personally from the mayor on down. I also happen to have about twelve other cases that are priorities, including a double homicide of two five-year-old kids. But that’s not the point. The point is I’m too busy keeping my head above water to waste time dicking around with you. I thought I had made that crystal clear the last time we talked.”

  “Things have happened. Things you should know about. Look, I’m trying to do the right thing here, bu
t you sure aren’t making it very easy.”

  Stockwell took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He folded his arms and sat back in his chair, looking me over. “What’s your grift, Riordan? Bishop told me he fired your ass. Why are you still nosing around in the embers?”

  I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to let my hair down. I said, “When I took this case I told Bishop that I had resolve-resolve in spades. Let’s just say I know I haven’t played this one as smart as I could and I don’t want to walk away with the score as it stands. I’m going to see it through.”

  Stockwell shook his head. “That’s putting a pretty face on it, Riordan. You feel like you’ve been made a fool of and you want to get even. It’s that simple. Problem is, there’s no one to get even with. Not really. The only thing that’s left to do is clean up the mess: find Terri McCulloch and put her in jail. Any chance you had of doing what Bishop really hired you to do is long gone.”

  “Some of what you said is true, but not all. I think there’s more to be done than just cleanup. For one thing, there are still players flitting around who aren’t on the program.”

  “You mean Nagel.”

  “For one.”

  “Okay, let’s dispense with the quilting circle chit-chat and get down to it. Just what do you have for me?”

  “Right. Exhibit A: Roland Teller’s laptop computer.” I set it on the desk in front of him.