Corpses Say the Darndest Things: A Nod Blake Mystery

by Doug Lamoreux

  Lisa was trading worried glances between me and the street. Gasping for breath, I looked out to see the end of the block housing Gina's apartment building and realized I'd been gone into the vision for some little while. I rolled my window down, gulping for fresh air, and staring across the dark open lot to the foreboding old brewery in the distance.

  Lisa raced the car down the drive into the cul-de-sac and pulled up to Gina's building. She didn't bother to park in a marked stall but rolled to a stop in front. I all but fell out of the car. By then, sisters and brothers, you've probably guessed that I was gone again. I had somehow been projected back into the Riaz house and, as with the previous murders, was being given the full bloody treatment. It's an experience, let me tell you, suffering others peoples’ violent deaths, being stabbed and bludgeoned, being strangled and hung, having your throat slit, all in quick succession. I was living the life of Riley. All I can say is, you try taking it without a peep.

  The cool evening air hit me and I was back in the present, on my knees on the walk outside of Gina's apartment, with Lisa at my side. My poor secretary looked horrified as she helped me up off the ground. I felt for her but couldn't help her. I felt for me, but I couldn't help me either. Just then, if I'd guessed right, Gina needed help more. “Come on,” I said and ran for the building.

  Lisa was a trooper. I hadn't taken the time in the office to explain why we were taking off like a shot. Despite that, after dealing with the shock of Love's creepy phone call, she'd come not only willingly but energetically. She'd suffered my psychic (or, if your prefer psychotic) antics en route, learned our destination only when it became necessary for her to take over the driving chores, and had gotten us both across town in short order and alive. Now, though she knew nothing about our mission, she was running with me stride for stride.

  On our way inside the building, we passed the decorative planter I mentioned to you some time ago. I didn't recognize it then, being too rattled by my recent mental adventures and my aching physical condition and too intent on getting upstairs on the hop now that we'd arrived, but I certainly should have. The artsy-fartsy six-pointed design that once existed in the garden planter had been spoiled. Only five large rocks remained. Somebody had taken one of them.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Lisa and I entered the lobby at a run. Well, she was running. I was limping but giving it all I had. Aside from the whacks I'd taken all along, beyond that first fall in the alley chasing Willie, being beat by John Nikitin, ambushed in the dark by Love, smacked by Mike Nikitin, and being hit by a car, beyond the hallucinations that made Charles Manson's visions look like cartoons, on the trip there I'd again gone through (don't ask me how, but you saw it yourself) the violence of all five murders in this case. Not seen them, experienced them in place of the victims. Not to complain but, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how'd you like the play? Lisa started for the elevator but, remembering my oath, I hooked a finger in her belt to catch her from behind. “The elevator hates me.” I pointed to a door. “The stairs. Fourth floor. It'll be faster.” The front desk clerk, the same fellow as on my last visit, ignored us entirely. Apparently he really had seen it all.

  Lisa took the lead on the stairs again as, desperately sore, I fell behind. She beat me up the zig-zag of steps, through the fourth floor fire door, stretched her lead in the hall, and was the first to arrive at Gina's door. She found it locked of course and started rapping and shouting Gina's name. Thudding down the hall behind her, I shouted, “Move!”

  Lisa jumped to the side as I slammed my shoulder into the door. Thank God the jamb busted and the lock gave way. The wood splintered, the lock plate flew. I stumbled face-first to the floor and rolled into the room like a hundred-eighty pound wad of chewed Bazooka Joe. When the building quit spinning, and it took a second, I stood painfully to see that I'd guessed right.

  Eddie Love was there in all his miserable and creepy glory, black cowboy boots, leather vest over a chiseled chest with no shirt between them, hellish tattoos (heavy in dull blues and bright crimsons), cascading straight brown locks, trimmed beard, ear rings, and that big black Stetson. God, I wanted to knock him out from underneath that hat. On the bright side, for once I'd actually guessed in time and maybe, finally, had gotten my chance to do just that. He had Gina on the floor and was straddling her stomach, but she was still alive. The way this case had been going, that was a monumental victory for the good guys. Best I could see, Love had her hair with one hand pinning her down and held the stone, from the planter out front (obviously), in the other. Gina let loose with a scream. Who could blame her? He'd been about to bust her face in when we'd made our chaotic entrance.

  I took more credit than we deserved with that last remark. Love had the chaos well started before we got there. He was about to prove he was fine with letting it continue. Seeing us he stood, towering above Gina, then turned on me. He held the stone above his head and the glint in his evil eye showed he had every intention of hurling it. I leapt before he had the chance, over the couch, tackling him. We struggled and I don't think it's whining to say that, due to my earlier injuries, though I had the drop on him I was still at a severe disadvantage. Lisa tried to help and got slapped back for her trouble. If I wasn't already mad, and I was, that did it for me. But I was prevented from going to her by Love repeatedly punching me in the throat and chest.

  I lost track of the next few minutes. No, it wasn't owing to brain pangs or hallucinations. I had nothing but the excuse that the good old-fashioned throttling had interrupted my ability to breathe and see. In the interim, both from what I pieced together myself and from the things Lisa told me, Love got to his feet, grabbed Gina by the front of her coat, dragged her to the window, and with zero hesitation shoved her out.

  That was a freaker.

  I caught my breath until I saw Gina's head pop back up on the other side of the window sill and realized there was a fire escape outside. (I couldn't say for sure that I was entirely convinced Eddie knew it was there when he pushed her.) Anyway, Love said something pithy as if he were a Bond villain making his escape in the new Moonraker and slipped through the frame after her. On the other side, he grabbed Gina and they disappeared. The orange curtains flapped in the breeze like Bozo's wild hair while the empty window, the clown's mouth, laughed at me like the muck I was.

  I tried to get up but fell twice. Feeling the way I was, I'd have had as much chance climbing to the top of the Sears Tower on a pogo stick. I tried again – because I had to – and finally, clutching my throat and gasping for a breath of air, struggled to my feet. I stumbled to help Lisa up. She said she was all right and I took her at her word. I told her to call Wenders. She hurried to the phone, dialed a number she knew only too well, and asked for the lieutenant.

  I looked out to see that Love had dragged his kidnap victim down four flights of fire escape, had yanked her up off the ground at the bottom, and was running, pushing Gina toward the open field behind the apartment building. The scene was like something out of one of the old television westerns from when I was a kid. I got a leg out the same window.

  “Blake,” Lisa shouted, “they're getting the lieutenant now.”

  “I can't wait,” I told her. “I've got to stop him before he finishes her.”

  “But Wenders is coming to the phone. The police are on their way and the lieutenant will be any minute.”

  “That doesn't solve my problem. They'll kill him, he'll force it. Then I'm really screwed. Without Love, I have no evidence.”

  “Blake, wait,” Lisa insisted. “There's something else. Something I've been trying to tell you. Gina…”

  Gina, Gina, Gina. I couldn't believe it. At a different time and place her catty jealousy might have been adorable but this was the absolute worst possible moment for it. She was being such a girl and I didn't have the time. “Not now.” I slipped the rest of the way out.

  The fire escape rattled and shook like a bag of rib cages as I descended two steps at a time. I knew Lisa and co
uld just imagine her, behind me, harrumph-ing in anger at my cutting her off, then returning to the phone to try to explain to that pig-headed Wenders what was happening. After she hung up, she'd poke her out-sized glasses back on her nose and stare at the empty window in annoyance, wondering after me. She was a good girl, Lisa.

  *

  The full moon was partially hidden by clouds making Eddie and Gina little more than two black smudges moving through the untended field. He was screaming at her and shoving her along, she looked to be fighting him and arguing back. I couldn't make out what either was saying. They made it to the other side, left the high grass and crossed a series of long-unused railroad tracks, a branch line of the old Milwaukee Railroad, with Gina alternately dragged and driven by Love, and entered the lot beyond. This fronted (backed) what once had been one of the city's premiere breweries.

  Though Chicago was never the beer mecca that Milwaukee, Wisconsin was, there were still plenty of breweries through most of the last century. The industry was at its height here in the 1890's and, soon after, was destroyed – like everything else – by the government sticking its nose in. Three acts of Congress, the temporary Wartime Prohibition Act (known as the `Thirsty-First' and intended to save grain for the war), the 18th Amendment (making the production, transportation and sale of alcohol illegal), and the Volstead Act (defining alcohol and enforcement), initiated a nation-wide fourteen year ban on booze from which Chicago never recovered. This Law of the Land, this hat-trick from hell known to the world as Prohibition, forced the brewery in front of me to close in 1918. Many of the others in town suffering the same fate were abandoned, given over to the rats, or demolished without a trace. This one had been lucky. Though it never reopened as a brewery, two years later a meat packing company moved in – until the Great Depression. The complex traded hands in '34 and again in 1940 when another packing company took it over to warehouse hams. Small businesses came and went in the night while the buildings aged and crumbled. In the late 60's, the facility was put on the National Register of Historic Places. When the designation prevented the owners altering their property, they had a cow and the buildings were erased from the register. So much for honorable history. Now it was a dilapidated shell; the lower floors in the hands of the recyclers, with the vast unused majority of the plant little more than a warehouse for memories and ghosts.

  Yeah, Prohibition was a pip. It created the murderous gangs of Chicago but did nothing to curb alcohol consumption. Everyone that wanted a barley pop got one, Al Capone saw to that. Legend had it that when this brewery closed, Capone took the facility over, ran it himself, and shipped beer out in milk cans. I could just picture the city's most infamous gangster in his white coat scaling the ladders and walkways inside with a copper ladle in his hand; the city's own crime master a happy Braumeister breaking Federal law. No matter how bad Chicago had been, as I chased the cowpoke kidnapper and his victim I couldn't help but think how sad and pathetic we'd become. Under that hat, Eddie Love was just another twisted murderer; no style at all. He wouldn't have been a pimple on Capone's ample ass. Then again, who was I kidding? I was no Elliot Ness. Still, as low rent as we were, I was the good guy and he was the bad. I intended to get him.

  A good distance behind, I heard thumps and thuds and could just make out Eddie kicking open one of the doors of what looked to have been the old brewery's rail shipping dock. Gina screamed as Eddie shoved her inside.

  I made it across the field, hurting like crazy, and came to a stop in the rail yard staring, first at the black hole of a door they'd vanished into, then up at the whole dark edifice; a collection of antique buildings like crazily stacked boxes stepping up at roof levels of varying heights with a tower rising over five stories near its center. I'd seen it the way it had been meant to be seen, in the daylight, from the front, a few times over the years; a complex of buildings, crowned with castle-like cornices, with old-world limestone tablets over each entrance telling of the specific function once carried out inside. From the back, none of what remained of the Germanic touches, sculpted design, windows, or face brick could be seen. It was a shadow of what once had been; a lot like me

  I drew nearer to see that I'd guessed right, these were the loading docks on the rail side of the rear-most building. The washed-out brick and weathered, in some places rotting, wood of the exterior wall gave it the look of an abandoned prison rather than a recycling center. A sign beside the door, beneath a broken light, barely visible in the cloud-covered moonlight, featured three blood red R's (almost black in the dimness) and, under those, the words Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Nothing else, not even their company name. It didn't matter what it looked like now; storage facility for miserable criminals or a staging place for trash to meet its end, either way it was the perfect hiding place for Love.

  I took a deep breath and followed them into the dark.

  Chapter Thirty

  I don't know why westerns were on my mind, but another entered my head just then. The ailing John Wayne, handed his death sentence by Dr. Jimmy Stewart, approaching the saloon, the villains' lair, for the final shootout. But The Duke had a gun. I stopped myself. I had a gun too, locked in the safe in my office. There was no one to blame for my being unarmed but me. I'm no hypocrite, I didn't completely regret it, I do hate guns. It was just that… John Wayne had a gun. Anyway, my villain's lair was the old brewery. I followed Love and the kidnapped Gina in slowly with ears pricked, taking baby steps Wayne would have been proud of, aching in every muscle, and gulping my spit to deal with the unease of the eerie dark unknown; at least trying to. My mouth was so dry it made the streets of Tucson look like Venice in the spring.

  Just inside the Love-battered wooden door, I strained to examine the old loading dock. It was creepy, as all old buildings are, but I can't say I saw Capone's cigar-smoking spirit or any ghosts of beer shipments past. Neither did I see Eddie or Gina. I moved off the dock and into the first floor of the rear building. At its booming height, the place had nearly 225,000 square feet of floor space, a half-million dollars’ worth of brewing equipment and ice machinery, water from an artesian well on the premises (long dried up I assumed), and an annual production capacity of 300,000 barrels of beer. (Being a curious gumshoe, I looked it up.) Now it had been taken over by the recyclers. The resource-saving statistics were impressive too, if that was your bag. Ten-thousand pounds of material shredded every working hour, a half-million pounds of paper a day, a hundred and fifty million pounds recycled every year or, as they liked to remind us, kept out of the landfill. To the birds, squirrels, and greenie tree-huggers, that was 4,250 trees a day. And that was just the paper. They also melted, shredded, pulped, then renewed nearly every product imaginable from polyester bowling balls to vinyl LPs. But that was in the daytime, when the resource-savers were out and about. In the nighttime there was nobody out but the users and no one and nothing in the plant except the rats, including one with a black cowboy hat. Plus yours truly, of course, one banged-up rat catcher. And, somewhere in the dark, Gina, his captive, whose time I imagined would soon be running out.

  To my right was a large windowed office, all closed and locked. Posters covered the warehouse side of its particle-board walls like cheap wallpaper. Group posters, green posters, proclamations about their city-wide “Anything That Tears Program,” and endless repeats of the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” mantra. To my left, partially lit by leaking moonlight, partially in gloom, but mostly in shadow and pitch darkness across the expansive first floor was a maze of crushing, tearing, shredding, and sorting machines, and stacks, walls, mountainous piles, and wheeled bins of both plastic and canvas filled to the brim with product, before, during, and after crushing. With the exception of the scratching and the occasional high-pitched squeak of the facility's afore-mentioned furry residents, all else seemed quiet. Where on this expansive first floor, or worse, deeper within this monstrous five-story labyrinth, had Love taken Gina?

  Despite my anxiety and sense of urgency, I sighed heavily and slowl
y started my search doing my best to move from one shadow to another as I went. I wanted to catch up to them quickly, obviously, but it wouldn't do anyone any good for me to take another surprise shot to the head. I passed a tower of trashed computer monitors and, once I'd recognized them for what they were, paused in amazement. They'd just perfected the things for home and office. Ours had only just been installed. Lisa hadn't even spilled any food on one yet. How, I wondered, could something that new already be junk? I was brought back to the mission at hand when, somewhere in the distance, I heard Gina cry out. It was a cross, if you asked me, between pain and terror and it not only alerted me but made me angry. Then I heard Eddie's demonic hiss. I'll leave out the colorful bells and whistles, you can imagine what he said, as he ordered her to shut her mouth. I quickened my pace as I headed that way.

  I could describe it for you, step by step, inch by inch, chill by chill racing up my spine as I hunted them over the next interminable minutes. But what would be the point? It all ended in the same way. Somewhere deep in the first floor, while I scanned the dark straining for a glimpse of anything, my ears pricked desperately searching for a sound, walking a tightrope of pins and needles, Love somehow got behind me and jumped out of the shadows, screaming.