“‘Vice is nice, but incest is best,’ eh? Who said that?”
“Oscar Wilde, I think.”
“So, does this sordid little tale of dysfunctional family living have a happy ending?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Just before the lights went down, he spotted a profile that was infuriatingly familiar, but which he couldn’t connect to a name. The man was tall and powerfully built, and considerably older than the blond beauty on his arm. She was patently bored by the conversation he was having with two men Caleb recognized as real-estate heavyweights.
Then the lights began to fade—he never failed to feel a surge of joy, of anticipation—and the magic drove all else from his notice.
He could tell, before the end of the overture, that Rick was going to hate it. At first, he divided his attention between Siegmund and Sieglinde and watched the surtitles translating for them. Then he began to study people in the audience. By the time Hunding arrived onstage, Rick was examining the architecture, and the pattern of the carpet. He shot his cuffs, adjusted his tie, and surreptitiously scraped imaginary dirt from under his fingernails. Then he shifted around in his seat to the sleep position adopted by bored students worldwide. Just as well, Caleb thought.
Caleb was no musician. Apart from long exposure and a general music-appreciation course in college, he’d had no formal musical training. Over the years he’d learned to listen and to understand beyond the literal translation of the story. Maybe it was only the morbid fascination engendered by all tragedy, from DUI accidents to Hamlet—he hadn’t seen enough Wagner to have thought of analyzing it—but he found he was hanging on every word. Even if you hated Wagner, there was power in the words and in the story. It reminded him of old newsreel films of Hitler’s speeches a German teacher had showed him, long ago, trying to fire his students with some passion for the language, some inkling of the power in the words.
And there were moments between the pomp and pomposity that overwhelmed his senses, moments that sent him home sated, moments when the glorious sound swelled him like an orgasm, threatening to burst his skin and explode his entire being like a star gone nova.
Maybe part of the anomie in the country was the absence of relevant epic and contemporary myth. There were occasional attempts—the hero’s journey in Star Wars, the creative retelling of the Christian incarnation tale in Starman and The Terminator— but for the most part, modern mythologizers retold the old stories without understanding. JFK was not really Macbeth, Apocalypse Now missed the point made in Heart of Darkness. Caleb thought of David Bisti and the old chestnut “Those Whom the gods love die young.” What he knew of the Navajo way of life—with its balance, and honesty and abhorrence of incest—was so opposite this story of incest, power struggle, and deception, that it must belong to a different species.
“Who’s my rival?” Rick sat up and yawned as the lights went up.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The old gent with the expensive suit and the Barbie doll on his arm? You’ve been watching him all night.”
It was the sort of exaggeration that was fueled by pique; Caleb didn’t consider jealousy a virtue. “His name is Harrison Wingate, and I’ve met him once.”
“Well, he obviously made an impression that once.”
“Your claws are showing.” As soon as he said it, Caleb was sorry. Rick stiffened as if he’d been slapped. To make amends, Caleb said, “He was one of the attendees at a reception where the guest of honor was murdered.”
“The Bisti case!”
“Yes.”
“You were there! You’ve been holding out on me.”
“It’s a police matter—an open investigation. I was asked not to discuss it.”
“I’ll quote you as an anonymous source.”
“I’m afraid it would be a conflict of interest.”
“And you’d know.”
“Maybe we should get a drink.”
After intermission, as they were making their way back to their seats, Caleb noticed Wingate going the other way. He was obviously not a fan.
The “flight” of the Valkyries, in the third act, held Rick’s attention. Young women—gymnasts—had been drafted for the parts and armed with “neon” weapons. They bounded across the stage, from one hidden trampoline to the next, giving the appearance of flight. It was a damned good show.
Then Rick began to cough softly, and he excused himself and went out. Caleb made up his mind that he wouldn’t let it spoil his enjoyment of the rest of the performance. But just as quickly, he decided he would have to leave.
He spotted Rick outside the front doors, just lighting a cigarette. He seemed embarrassed to be caught, but nevertheless took a deep drag before saying, “Caught me.”
“Hmmm.”
“Listen, I didn’t mean to spoil the show for you. I could meet you here afterward.” Caleb shook his head. “Well…You’ve seen it before, right?”
“We can leave if you’d like.”
“As a matter of fact, I’m starved.” Caleb nodded. “Do you think you could get us into Planet Hollywood?”
Fifty-One
Thinnes was in the front room, directing the photographer to shoot all the empties, when Oster came back from talking to the manager. Thinnes had sent him to get addresses for the next of kin. There were two burly uniforms trailing behind him, one carrying a stretcher, the other an empty body bag.
“The ME’s going with your call on this one, Thinnes,” Oster said, “but he wants a copy of your report ASAP. And he wants us to find out who West’s doctor was.” He added, unnecessarily, “Oh, and Bendix is here.”
Bendix had come up quietly and was standing right behind him.
“I was in the neighborhood,” Bendix said. “Thought I’d offer to help you guys out.”
“There’s nothing for you to do here,” Thinnes said. “There’s no crime, so there’s no crime scene.”
“Then why’d you call for evidence?”
“Documentation. Just a death investigation—natural causes. I thought those were beneath you.”
“Long as I’m here, mind if I have a look?”
“Be my guest.”
Bendix walked into the front room, followed by the uniforms. Oster pointed to the hall and led the coppers to the john.
Meanwhile, Officer Noir came back with the dog and stood in the hall outside, waiting for further orders. The dog sat, quiet and alert, at his side. Its huge feet and off-white coat were black, in spots, with West’s dried blood.
“Landlord said he won’t take it,” Noir told Thinnes. “And Animal Control can’t get here for at least an hour.”
Situation normal, Thinnes thought, all fucked up.
“Well,” he told Noir, “tell the landlord, if he wants us to take it away, he’s gonna have to let us hose the blood off somewhere.”
“Us?”
“Please.”
“This isn’t in my job description.”
“Sure it is. We serve and protect.”
Noir looked ready to do murder himself.
“Hold on a minute,” Thinnes told him. He went back into West’s bedroom, to the closet where he’d seen what looked like clean laundry. There were towels folded beneath the other stuff. He pulled out three and brought them back to Noir. “I’ll owe you one.”
Noir swallowed whatever he was going to say and took the towels. He stalked off, with the dog trailing.
Bendix had finished with the scene and hauled his box of tricks away, and the coppers had packed West up and shipped him by the time Noir returned with the dog. He waited with it in the hall. The animal was wet but clean. Noir had changed his leather duty gloves for latex. His uniform was damp and splattered with what Thinnes hoped was just mud.
“I used up all my disinfectant,” Noir told him. “And they’re going to be able to skate down the alley. Oh, and I tossed the towels.”
“Thanks, Noir.” Thinnes pulled out his wallet and extracted a ten. “This cover cleaning
your uniform?”
Noir looked surprised, then as if he wanted to say something. He did say, “Yeah, thanks,” as he took the bill.
Thinnes handed him a twenty. “You and Azul have one on me when you get off.”
“Thanks,” he said again. This time he sounded like he meant it. He pocketed the money. “What do you want me to do with the dog?”
It was still sitting where Noir had parked it when they’d come back from its bath.
Thinnes got out his keys. “Put him in the back of my car. And start it up so he doesn’t freeze. We’ll be down in a minute. Oh, and give Animal Control another call. Tell ’em to pick him up at Area Three.”
Before Noir could comply, Bendix came back into the hall. “Thinnes, you—” He broke off when he spotted the dog, then grinned slyly. “That a witness?”
“What do you want, Bendix?”
Bendix never passed up a chance to get his licks in. “It’s your offender in the Uptown case, isn’t it? Great detective work, Thinnes. You got him cold—for littering, anyway. And if you play your cards right, maybe even conspiracy to commit loitering.”
Noir folded his arms across his chest and covered his mouth with one hand, but he still couldn’t stop his shoulders shaking as he laughed. Thinnes glared at him, and he turned quickly toward the door Bendix had entered by. The dog was up and after him like an obedience-trial champ.
Thinnes turned on Bendix. “What?”
Bendix checked the hall, then said, “I been thinking. Even though this looks like a busted pipe, I’ll bet it was murder.”
Oster came out of the apartment to stand in the doorway. Folding his arms, he leaned against the jamb. His presence seemed to make Bendix more belligerent.
“Twenty bucks!” Bendix said. He pulled out his wallet, removed a twenty, and waved it in front of Thinnes.
Thinnes said, “You’re on!”
Bendix handed the bill to Oster. “You can hold it.”
Oster took the money and shrugged. Thinnes got out his wallet. He had a twenty and a five left; he gave Oster the twenty. Bendix turned and walked away.
Noir and Azul were sitting in their squad, making sure the Caprice was safe from car thieves and dognappers. Oster and Thinnes got in it, and Thinnes waved to them. They turned on their lights and took off.
Inside, the Caprice was warm as Florida in August, but the car smelled like the wet dog shivering on the backseat. It figured. Thinnes turned off the heat and cracked the window before he pulled away from the curb.
When they’d gone about eight blocks, Oster put his hands over his face and said, “Christ! Six more hours.”
Until quitting time.
“You could call in sick, Carl.”
Oster thought it over. “Nah. I’ll be okay soon as I get some coffee in me.”
The long silence, as they drove, was interrupted when the dog thumped its tail against the backseat. Oster twisted around to look at it. “Poor bastard probably hasn’t eaten in days. Maybe we oughta swing by McDonald’s and get him something.”
Thinnes had been trying to figure out why Bendix would make a sucker bet, when West obviously died of natural causes. He dragged his attention back to the car. “Huhn?” McDonald’s. “McDonald’s?”
Oster gave him a hurt, you-weren’t-paying-attention-again look.
“Why don’t you just take the damn thing home with you, Carl?” They came even with Addison, and Thinnes turned west. Toward McDonald’s.
“Can’t. My daughter’s allergic.”
“How’s that working out?” He stopped for the light at Western.
“So far, so good.” Oster looked out the window as he answered. Even at 10:30 P.M. there were plenty of people out and about, and a fair amount of traffic on both Addison and Western. “She seems to have ditched her attitude with the bum.” The light changed, and the car started forward. “It’s like having my little girl back.”
Neither of them said anything more until Thinnes stopped to give their order at McDonald’s drive-up. He looked back at the dog and said, “What do you want?”
The dog wagged its tail.
Oster started to take out his wallet, but Thinnes beat him to it. “Just coffee, or d’you want something else?”
Oster sagged back in his seat. “Coffee’ll do it.”
“A large coffee and a Quarter Pounder,” Thinnes said into the speaker. When he pulled up to the pay window, he gave the girl his last bill, a ten. He stuffed the change she gave him into his pocket without counting it. The girl at the next window asked, “Cream or sugar?”
Oster said, “Yeah.”
She dropped a handful of paper sugar packets and three plastic cream containers in a cardboard tray that already held a large polystyrene cup and a paper bag decorated for Christmas with the golden arches. When she handed the tray to Thinnes, he passed it to Oster and drove on.
The dog was sitting up on the backseat, watching hopefully, brushing the car door with his tail. Oster balanced the tray on the seat while he unwrapped the Quarter Pounder, broke it in quarters, and offered one to the dog. The animal took it delicately, then swallowed it in one gulp. By the time a break in traffic gave Thinnes the chance to pull onto Addison, the Quarter Pounder was history.
When they got to headquarters, the dog created only slightly less of a stir than a lost toddler. Western and Belmont was, after all, the station where they’d cordoned off a scene with police-line tape so Maggie the duck, a not-so-wild mallard, could incubate her eggs undisturbed in a planter near the door. And the same hardened cops had given the duck and her family a police escort to the river when the hatchlings were ready for their first swim.
Thinnes walked the dog on the little fringe of grass east of the parking lot before he brought it inside, and before he got it upstairs, four people offered to walk it and three others offered it food. Nobody wanted to take it home. One of the Property Crimes dicks raided Lost and Found for an old coat, so it wouldn’t have to lie on the bare squad room floor.
Upstairs, Thinnes put his papers on the table and threw the borrowed coat under it. He tied the dog to a table leg and ordered him to sit on the coat and go to sleep. It did.
“Rossi!” Oster whispered fiercely. He grabbed his McDonald’s cup and rushed to the coffee machine, near Rossi’s office door.
Both of the Property Crimes dicks sitting across the room got up and came over to stand in front of Thinnes. One spread his Tribune out on the table and leaned over it as if fascinated by the story.
“What the hell…?” Thinnes said.
“You want to have to explain your friend to the boss?”
As Rossi neared the table, he was distracted by the sound of a large cup of coffee hitting the floor near his office, followed by Oster’s resounding, “Goddamn it!”
The ploy worked. Rossi rushed past the table to survey the damage, and the Property Crimes detectives hurried after him, positioning themselves between him and the sleeping dog.
Rossi muttered a curse and shook his head. “Clean it up,” he said, and hurried into his office. Oster went to get some paper towels.
There was something familiar about the name of Abner West’s nephew, more than just because he was named after a sainted celebrity. Thinnes got the files out for his three unsolved cases—the dead-Indian cases—and began to page through them. He found what he was looking for in the Uptown Indian file—recently rechristened for Thomas Redbird. “Poke Salad Annie.” The drunken bag lady who’d insisted, “Elvis done it,” when the beat cop questioned her.
“Carl,” Thinnes said, “what do you think would make a long-winded old boozer like West keep his mouth shut about a shooting he witnessed?”
“Fear,” Oster said.
“Maybe. But it looks like he was close enough so the shooter must have seen him. What do you think would keep a stone-cold killer, like the one who did Redbird, from killing a long-winded old boozer like West? Just for insurance?”
“They were friends, maybe?”
/> “According to his neighbors, West didn’t have any friends but his dog.”
“Kin!” Oster said. “Relatives. ‘The kind of bum that’s got a prison record.’ What was the nephew’s name?”
“Elvis Hale.”
“Then we got a witness. Poke Salad Annie said Elvis did it.”
“I wouldn’t want to try to convict anyone on her say-so, but it’s a start.”
Oster stood up. “I think I’ll just go put a wanted-for-questioning out on Elvis, and we’ll see what he has to say for himself.”
“And get me a copy of his arrest record, will you?”
First watch had begun by the time Thinnes was done working on the preliminary for Abner West’s death investigation. He couldn’t finish the report until he got the ME’s report or the autopsy report—if they decided to do an autopsy. West had been old and sick and under a doctor’s care, and there’d been no suspicious circumstances. Thinnes outlined the case for the watch commander—Rossi’d left by then—and put away his open case files. He had his coat on and was on his way down the stairs when the sergeant called him back.
“Thinnes, you forget something?” He pointed to the table Thinnes had been sitting at to do his paperwork.
Thinnes looked. Under the table, the dog was curled up like a sled dog.
“Animal Control was supposed to come for him,” he told the sergeant.
“Well, they didn’t. So it’s all yours.”
“I don’t need a dog.”
The sergeant shrugged, shook his head, and held his arms away from his sides in an it’s-out-of-my-hands gesture. “Well, then you take it to the pound. You’re not leavin’ it here.”
Damn!
Thinnes went to a phone and called Animal Control.
“Whadda ya mean, when’re we gonna show? We sent a truck out for that dog an hour after you called. They said they never heard of any dog.”
“Who did you talk to?”
The Death of Blue Mountain Cat Page 20