His baby blue summer-weight button-down was ironed and immaculate, as was his yellow necktie, which was knotted perfectly under his strong chin. His blazer was also lightweight and only when I looked for it, could I find his sidearm, which was nicely concealed by fabric that more than likely had been specially tailored to accommodate the piece.
I only point all this out because he struck me as the polar opposite of John Cattivo who, in life, was as obvious about his distaste for neatness as he was his love of guns and love/hatred for himself and his wife.
The same two forensics officers were still working on John. The young woman who’d taken a photo of my wrist was still snapping away at John’s head. When Miller walked in, she shot him a look and issued him a pleasant smile, as if they were two coworkers mingling around the water cooler. Funny how commonplace violent death is to some people who are in the business.
Miller didn’t start right in on examining his coworker. In fact, he didn’t give John’s shattered head a second look, as if the carnage that painted the wall and window behind him were just another aspect of the interior decorating, and a mundane aspect at that.
Instead he took some time to admire the impressive Cattivo firearms collection.
“I’m aware Cattivo was a gun nut,” he said contemplatively. “But I wasn’t aware to what extent. Christ, there’s gotta be three-hundred grand hanging on these walls.” Then, turning to face the dead detective. “And a whole lot of Oops spread out over that wall.” He smiled. “At least, Oops is your story. Isn’t that right, Mr. Forrester?”
I felt the ice water once more fill up my spine. I didn’t like the way Miller said that. But then, I guess that was his job. To make me uncomfortable. To make me slip up if indeed, there was a good reason for me to slip up.
He took one more good look at the guns, eyeing them up and down. “I suppose the Missus will sell off the collection now. Make herself enough money to buy up some property down in Florida.” He shifted his focus to me. “I’m told she enjoys her sunbathing.” He followed up with a wink of his eye. “Surprised I’ve never heard of anyone at the APD fielding a complaint from one of the neighbors.”
“She’s pretty well hidden back there,” I said, knowing immediately that I should not have.
“Really,” he said, shooting me a gaze. “You speak as an experienced watcher.”
“Not really,” I said. “I’m the next door neighbor. I’m home all day when most of the neighborhood is at work or school.”
“That so?” he said, turning slowly back to the guns.
After a time, he peeled himself from the gun case, dismissed the two forensic cops. Then, when we were alone, he walked around the desk, took his first good look at John. He took his time examining the corpse, at one point, positioning himself so that he faced the desk the same way Cattivo faced the desk when he put the barrel of the Colt .45 in his mouth moments before spotting the blood stain on the floor. After a contemplative few beats, he shoved both hands back into his trouser pockets, and came back around the desk.
“Say, I’ve got one for you,” he said. “What do you call a man with a shovel impaled in his head?” He turned toward John’s busted up head, then back to me.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Doug,” he said, with a grin. “Get it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Ha. I get it.” But I didn’t feel much like joking. “Can we be done with this now? I’m starting to feel sick. And to be honest, I could use a drink.”
He lifted up his hand as if to tell me to hold on, take some time out to smell the roses.
“And what do you call a man who doesn’t have a shovel impaled in his brains?”
Fuck, when is this gonna end?
I shook my head.
“Douglas,” he said like Doug-less, while bursting out in laughter. “That one always busts me up.”
“Must be John’s head-shot made you think of it,” I said.
He nodded, bit down on his lip. “Sorry to appear flippant in the face of such serious circumstances, Mr. Forrester,” he said. “But I’m sure as a script writer, you understand the need for comic relief now and again.”
“Oh most definitely,” I said.
“So then,” he said, pulling a notepad and pen from the interior pocket on his blazer, “I’d like for you to recount exactly what happened here this evening.”
“I already did that for the officers,” I swallowed.
He smiled politely, issued me another wink.
“Now you get to do it for me,” he said. “If you don’t mind.”
I felt myself hesitating while I locked eyes on John’s face and head. His eyes had since been closed by the forensics people, but I still felt them staring me down. The stare said, “I’m gonna get you for this, Hollywood!”
Miller must have sensed my apprehension. My discomfort. My ever-growing paranoia…
“We can go somewhere else if you’d feel more comfortable,” he suggested.
“You mind?” I said.
He waved for the forensics cops to come back in, adding, “We’re gonna take a walk, guys. Bag Detective Cattivo and get him a date for a slice and dice at the Albany Med morgue. Looks like you’re all done here.”
“Roger that, Detective Miller,” said the ponytailed woman with the digital camera. “So it’s a suicide then?”
“Until I say it ain’t, Laura,” Miller said.
“Beer later?” she said.
“Most certainly,” he said.
I had trouble picturing Detective Miller having a private life, as though he were a police robot that someone unplugged at the end of the day. He was about to walk out of the room when he spotted something by the gun cases. He stepped over to the case, bent down at the knees, and stared at the same bloodstain that John discovered.
“That’s mine,” I said, immediately wishing I hadn’t spoken up at all.
“What?” he said, looking up at me.
“That’s my blood,” I said. “My foot.”
“So you were standing right here when he shot himself?”
Pulse picking up. Brain buzzing.
“Yes,” I lied. “I suppose I was.”
He nodded, stared at the stain once more.
“Looks kind of like old blood,” he said. “Not blood that would have stained the floor just a few minutes ago. But then, hey, I could be wrong.” He stood. “Get a sample of this, will you Laura? Try and get somebody to tell you how old it is.”
I wanted to scream. But what the hell could I do?
He approached me, his face beaming with a smile as he squeezed out the door, careful not to knock into one of my crutches.
“Let’s go get some air outside,” he said.
“There’s a deck out back.”
“The deck for sun worshipping,” he said. “Tell you what, I’ll even let you enjoy a cold beer while we chat.”
Crutching across the kitchen floor, I gazed upon Lana and Susan who were seated at the round kitchen table. Lana had a blanket wrapped around her shoulders as if the winter had arrived early. She also appeared to be shivering. Although I tried to capture her attention by clearing a dead frog from my throat, she wouldn’t look up at me or do anything to acknowledge my presence. All she could manage, or so it seemed, was to keep her face down, her blue eyes peering into her cup of tea like it had the power to transport her a million miles away from Orchard Grove.
However, for the first time since John’s killing, Susan made a point of peering directly at me, issuing me a stare that was both blank and stone cold silent.
“How is she?” I asked.
“How would you be, Ethan?” she groused, while wrapping her right arm around Lana, hugging her tightly.
Behind me stood Detective Miller, who was witnessing the exchange. I wondered if he could sense the pounding of my heart. Once more, I had to ask myself, What the hell is happening here? My stomach was tied up in a knot. I knew we had to make things look realistic in front of the cops. Like wh
atever happened to John was truly an accident. But this was taking things too far. By ignoring me or snapping at me, the women were making it look like I actually shoved the barrel of the .45 into Cattivo’s mouth and pulled the trigger. But then, that’s exactly what happened. What I mean is, they had no way of seeing me shove the gun barrel into his mouth. And even if they did, it’s what Lana wanted. It’s what she needed if she was going to live. If I was going to keep on living.
Miller pulled ahead of me, descended to the two steps into the playroom, opened the sliding door.
“Mr. Forrester,” he said, “time is getting tight.”
“Coming,” I said, hobbling down into the family room, and out the open door, the many framed faces of John that hung on the wall staring me down the entire way.
Instead of standing or sitting, he leaned his left thigh over the edge of the table while planting his right foot flat on the wood deck. That way he was neither standing nor sitting. He also crossed his arms over his chest, that little notebook still gripped in one hand, the pen in the other. If he were one of the characters in my scripts, I would have described him as tough, neat, confident, experienced.
I took the chair beside him, leaning my crutches against the tabletop. I didn’t realize it at first, but my hands were trembling. When I looked up at Miller, he was staring at my hands.
“Your first dead body, huh?” he said.
“Yes,” I said, knowing full well that the killer inside me was responsible for that dead body, and for the trembling hands.
“You know, this place… Orchard Grove… wasn’t always a sleepy peaceful suburban neighborhood.”
“How so?”
“Back in the early Eighties, more than a dozen men and boys disappeared or were found dead, including the original owner of the apple orchard that once occupied this very spot.”
“You mean, like a serial killer?”
“Who was never found. We called him the North Albany Mauler. It’s a case that didn’t go cold, but that froze solid. One of the first cases I worked right out of college for the APD. My absolute first as a young detective. And one of the only cases, it turns out, that I wasn’t able to solve.”
“Things like that must come back to haunt your dreams,” I said. “A serial killer in little old Albany.”
“Crazy isn’t it?” he said. “But let me tell you something. The first body I came across… the Mauler’s first victim… not only made my hands tremble just like yours, but I found myself tossing my cookies for a period of about forty-eight hours. It wasn’t the sight of a decapitated body that got to me, so much as the smell of him. I could almost taste the death. It was a taste that would not go away for a long time. I guess I still taste it. Only difference between then and now, is that I’m used to it.”
We pondered that for a minute while I wished for a stiff drink.
“Now,” he said, after a time. “Start from the beginning. From the time you arrived here tonight.”
I did as he told me. Recounted the evening’s events from the moment we arrived at the Cattivo house, to the moment he arrived back home drunk, to my questioning him about his willingness to teach me about guns and how they work, to his agreeing to show me his collection. Then I got to the part about his demonstrating a cop suicide by eating his piece. Something I needed for a crucial scene in the script I was presently writing.
Miller smiled, but it wasn’t out of happiness. More like an inquisitive smirk.
“Why ask him to go through the motions of demonstrating something like that when you’re certainly smart enough to imagine how it’s done? You make your living from writing scripts, am I right?”
I nodded. “Research from the Internet is one thing. To see something live, up close, and personal is another thing altogether.”
There was a pause filled by the sound of a pair of squirrels rustling in the apple tree beyond the fence.
He said, “You sure got the up close and personal treatment, all right. That blood on your arm is the proof.”
I resisted the urge to look at my wrist.
He said, “I suppose Cattivo must have derived some sort of perverse kick out of displaying his own murder for your benefit. How drunk was he?”
“Staggering,” I said. Then, “Listen, Detective Miller, obviously I wouldn’t have asked him to stick the barrel of a gun in his mouth if I knew it was loaded. But yes, he seemed hell bent on showing me how it was done. Almost like he wanted to do it for real. Like he had a death wish.” I was pouring it on, for obvious reasons.
Biting down on his thin bottom lip, the detective cocked his head, shrugged his shoulders.
“Or so we can only assume at this point,” he said. “Because even from where I’m standing, I could see that his two top teeth were broken off at the mid-point. Holy Christ in a breadbasket, he must have really wanted to show you how it was done.” Then, leaning into me, like he needed to communicate something under his breath. “I’m gonna be frank with you, Mr. Forrester. Not a lot of people on the force were too crazy about ole’ John. He was kind of an asshole, if you know what I mean. Not even his partner liked him.”
I felt a jolt in my stomach. Lana’s warning came to mind. If we didn’t figure out a way to make John dead first, he would kill her for sleeping with Carl. For breaking the cop cardinal rule.
“His partner was just here,” I said. “Maybe you saw him coming out on your way into the house?”
He shook his head.
“Carl Pressman,” he said. “He say anything to you about the situation? Anything at all?”
“Not a whole lot,” I said, all the time wondering if Miller knew about his affair with Lana. “He just gave me a look like I personally just blew his partner’s brains out, then he mumbled something about his being in touch soon.”
“He seem visibly upset?”
“Angry, I guess,” I said. “But he didn’t seem to be shedding any tears for his partner.”
I might have told Miller about the confrontation John, Lana, and Carl had out on the deck earlier this afternoon, but I decided to let it go for now. It would only further implicate me as a voyeur.
He bowed his head, said, “Like I told you, John wasn’t too well liked.” He finished with a wink of his eye, like he and I now shared a secret, and having shared that secret, we now possessed a common bond. Cop to script writer, script writer to cop.
Miller didn’t stop there.
“Word up on the street,” he added, “is that John wasn’t very nice to the old lady. You know, he’d wave around that APD hand cannon of his like it was a toy. Fact is, he was reprimanded more than a couple of times at the Poughkeepsie PD for mishandling his service weapon. My guess is Carl was making a check on the scene of his old partner’s unfortunate demise just to make certain Lana hadn’t actually been the one to pull the trigger herself. Something she’d probably fantasized about in the past.”
“Guess I never figured that,” I said, now feeling somewhat encouraged by his logic. “He ever shoot anyone with his service weapon? By accident?”
Flashing through my brain, Cattivo holding his automatic on my wife and his, just last night out on my back deck.
“Good question, Mr. Forrester. Say, you don’t mind my calling you, Ethan, do you? Too many syllables to get through with Mister Forrester.”
“Not at all.”
“Well, Ethan, in answer to your query, as far as I know, Cattivo never shot anyone he didn’t mean to shoot. But he has shot and killed several perps who threatened his life with firearms of their own. Mostly inner-city situations. In Los Angeles and Poughkeepsie.”
“Go figure.”
“Yes, go figure. Detective Cattivo was pretty good at getting himself in trouble with his gun. Did you know some cops can go their entire career without ever having to draw their firearm in the line of duty even once?”
“I wasn’t aware of that.”
“It would make for a pretty boring crime flick I would imagine, should you decide to write ab
out a cop like that. Now wouldn’t it?”
“Sure. But if John was so much trouble, why hire him on?”
“It’s Albany, Ethan. We have enough trouble filling the force with top cops as it is. And despite his trigger-happy ways, John was a very good cop. An experienced cop. Hard to come by.”
“Now it’ll be even harder,” I said, knowing I shouldn’t have.
He fell quiet for a moment. If he were a smoker, this would have been the perfect time to pull out his pack, shake one loose, light it with a silver-plated Zippo. Instead he slapped a mosquito off the back of his neck with his little notebook. Bringing the notebook around front, he flicked the remains of the insect off the cover.
“I’ll tell you something else, Ethan,” he said, after a beat. “In confidence, of course.”
Raising my hand, I made the sign-of-the-cross.
He said, “From what I also understand, Mrs. Cattivo hasn’t been all that faithful to her husband.” He followed with another wink of the same eye.
Pulse elevating. “You don’t say.”
“I do, and I’m sorry to bring it up at a time like this when his body isn’t even cold yet. But apparently, Lana’s what we describe at the APD as a player. Do you know what a player is, Ethan?”
“Of course I do,” I said. “I lived in LA for a while.”
If our dialogue was something from out of a 1950s black and white film noir, I would have added “copper” to the end of my sentence.
“Hey, that’s pretty funny,” he said though a faux laugh. Then, leaning into me once more. “The reason they had to pull up stakes downstate is over her numerous affairs, I’m told. One of them having occurred with John’s own partner at the time.”
My stomach muscles bunched up and my mouth went dry. Did he know about Lana and Pressman? Was he playing with my head to see if I’d back down and confess something? I should have taken him up on that offer of a beer while we chatted.
“What’s any of this got to do with what happened tonight?”
Cocking his head over his shoulder, he said, “Not a whole lot, from a direct perspective. But indirectly, her actions could bear some significant weight. That is, he still loved her.”
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