Blood in Babylon

by Blake Banner

  “Yes, I see.”

  Dehan was making a note in her pad. She laid down her pen, drew breath, hesitated and then asked, “So what made you think that he was planning to get married?”

  It was his turn to look surprised, first at Dehan, then at me and then back at Dehan again. “Well, he told us. I assumed you knew.”

  “You’d had contact with him?”

  “Why, yes! He contacted us. He said he wanted to build bridges, make peace. He wanted a family reunion. He said he had wonderful news he wanted to share with us. Maximilian insisted we all meet at my house, where Aloysius would be less likely to be recognized. Annunziata was terrified that they might have found some way of treating his condition…”

  Dehan scowled. “Terrified? Why the hell was she terrified about that?”

  Justinian looked slightly terrified. I didn’t blame him. “Well,” he said, “most people in full possession of their senses are rational beings. But Aloysius in full possession of his senses was a very dangerous, chaotic man. To say he was a loose cannon would be a considerable understatement. The way he carried on, he could have brought the company to its knees in a year. So the prospect of his being given a clean bill of mental health, and fit to run his own affairs, would have been very scary news indeed, for all of us.”

  I said, “But it wasn’t that.”

  “No, as it turned out, it was far worse. He said that he had met a woman, that he was in love with her, that he had proposed to her and she was willing to marry him and look after him. Well, I needn’t tell you that Max and Anne poured the most wicked scorn on him. But he stuck to his guns and said it was true, and that he wanted our blessing.”

  “Did he tell you who this woman was?”

  “No, he said she was an angel and that he would introduce us to her. He was certain that once we met her, we would love her. Poor Aloysius. He was always so simplistic and naïve.”

  Dehan sighed and rubbed her face. “Dr. Chester, please think very carefully. This could be crucially important in finding out who murdered your brother. Did he give any indication at all, make any comment, about who this woman might be?”

  He placed his palms on his lap and puffed out his cheeks. “He said she was an angel, that she was young and beautiful, since he had met her, she had turned his life around, and that he saw her every day. She came to visit him.”

  Dehan was watching him through squinting eyes. She chewed her lip. “She visited him every day? How long had that been going on? Had he told Epstein about it?”

  Justinian blinked a lot and seemed to shudder. “Which of those questions would you like me to answer first? He said every day. Frankly, I thought he was hallucinating this woman, if you must know. I didn’t ask how long it had been going on, not being his mother! As for Dr. Epstein, you shall have to ask him about that.”

  He cast his eyes over me and said, “And now, if you will forgive me, I have suffered quite enough abuse and innuendo for one day. My intention was to assist the police. Had I known what I was exposing myself to, I should never have dreamed of coming!”

  He turned to Dehan, sighed and shook his head. “Such loveliness. You are far too lovely for this ugly job. You should be a model, or marry a millionaire.”

  “Thanks for the advice.”

  “I’m going. You won’t tackle me on the way out and beat me up, will you?”

  I shook my head. “Not this time, Dr. Chester.”

  He stood and stalked out, allowing the door to bang closed behind him.

  Dehan got to her feet, thrust her hands in her back pockets and did a full circuit of the room. Eventually, she stopped with her back to me, staring at the wall a couple of inches in front of her nose.

  “You believe him?”

  “Yes.”

  She turned to me. Her face said she was surprised and a little irritated. “You believe him…”

  “Yes.”

  “You think Chavez is lying, but this guy is telling the truth.”

  “Yes, Detective Dehan, I do.”

  “You want to explain what it is that makes Dr. Justinian Chester, AKA Maggie Smith, believable and Julio Chavez not?”

  I nodded. “Sure. Chavez was lying to keep his brother in the same prison with him, and Max already told us they had discussed killing Aloysius and discarded the idea.”

  She went up on her toes a couple of times.

  “Oh.”

  “What he didn’t make clear was how serious they got before they remembered their Hippocratic oaths.”

  “Mh-hm…”

  “The questions for us now are, how serious did they get? And also, did they in fact discard it? The notion that Max has a man who has a man, who has a man who takes care of things, is really not that hard for me to believe. And I can see that the scenarios that Justinian was describing, with Al married to some kind of evil manipulator, might well have scared them enough to take action. None of them wanted to go back to the dark days of the late sixties/early eighties. Maybe they decided to put an end to it before it even started.”

  Dehan sighed and nodded. “A professional hit would explain the lack of forensic evidence.”

  “It would. But the whole thing opens up a lot of issues.”

  She regarded me from under her brows and went up on her toes again. “Like?”

  I thought for a moment and made a face. “For one, if it’s true that he was considering marriage, as I believe it is, why didn’t Maximilian mention it?”

  “They would want to keep that quiet…”

  “But more to the point, the question that really interests me is, why did Epstein not mention it? Surely that would have been a major issue for his guardian and his psychiatrist to be involved in. So why did he not mention that to us?”

  She grunted, nodding. “Yeah, that is odd.”

  “It is more than odd. I’d say it’s key.” I held up my thumb. “One, if Justinian’s story is true, why didn’t Epstein tell us about Al’s marriage plans?” I held up my index. “Two, if it is not true, then what is Justinian doing spreading this kind of story? What is his intention? What is he trying to achieve?” I held up my middle finger. “Three. If what Justinian is telling us is true, then both of the above apply.”

  She went up on her toes again, biting her lip. “Why didn’t Epstein tell us about Al’s plans to marry, and also, why has Justinian told us? His excuse was he didn’t know what Max had told us, and he wanted to protect them from incriminating themselves. But that is pure, prime grade BS. He had another motive, I agree.”

  I stood. “We need to go and look at the house.”

  She looked surprised. “Now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about Anne—Annunziata? I kind of want to go and talk to her, don’t you?” She was frowning, quizzical.

  I smiled and pulled the door open. “Yeah, I kind of do, but I am even more curious to see how long it is before she comes to us.”

  She made a big ‘O’ with her mouth. “Huh… OK.”

  She followed me out of the interrogation room and we walked slowly down the stairs, side by side. Halfway down, she said, “What about Epstein? Aren’t we going to ask him why he omitted to tell us about Al’s marriage plans?”

  I nodded and we went into the detectives room, where I collected the case file from my desk. Then we stepped out into the afternoon sun and made for the Jag.

  “Yes,” I said, and I leaned on the sun-warmed roof of the car, tapping it gently with my keys. “But we don’t know yet, do we, for a fact, that Al did intend to marry somebody.” I studied the key a moment. “This has come right out of left field. I would like to be a little more sure of my facts before we tackle Dr. Epstein again.” I shook my head. “Dr. Epstein is a very smart man.”

  I climbed in the car and slammed the door. She got in beside me. “What are you thinking?”

  “I don’t know.” I fired up the big old engine and backed out of the lot, then turned onto Storey Avenue. “I don’t know,” I said again. “But I
have the feeling we need to pick over all these facts very carefully. There is something, right there in front of our noses, that we are not seeing. Something so obvious, it’s invisible.”

  “And you think you are going to find that in his house. Where whatever trace evidence may be left is twelve years old?”

  I nodded. “Maybe.”

  “Oh, OK…”

  We turned onto White Plaines and cruised steadily north without talking. We had the windows open and I glanced a couple of times at Dehan, where she sat with her aviators and her hair whipping across her face. It was a thing I would never grow tired of looking at.

  At Gleason, we turned right, then left into Virginia Avenue and right again into Ellis. There I parked and climbed out of the car. I stood, leaning on the open door and staring at the house. Dehan came and leaned on my shoulder. I pointed at the front door.

  “They were there. Right there. Ned, Julio and Ernesto Chavez, Lucky, El Loco… all of them, right there, pushing on that door. And he was inside, panicking, terrified, haunted not just by these bastards, but by his own dark demons. He could feel some kind of darkness closing in on him. How did he describe it? A tsunami of darkness. Beings that had followed him from Mexico.”

  Dehan nodded. “He slammed the door twice, broke the little shit’s fingers and then managed to slam it closed. From there, he went and telephoned Dr. Epstein.”

  I jerked my head. “Let’s go.”

  We crossed the road and pushed open the gate. The small, overgrown front yard lay in the dappled shade of a giant plane tree that overlooked the house. I trod the short path, climbed the five steps to the old, wooden front door, and slipped the key into the lock, trying to imagine what Al had felt that night, twelve years earlier, as he fumbled with these very keys, hearing Ned and his pals closing in on him from behind.

  I pushed open the door, spreading a stack of mail across the dusty, beige carpet. Dehan stepped in behind me and closed the door. We were in a small entrance hall with a flight of steps rising to the upper floor on our left. On the right, after a small entrance porch, the space opened out into an open plan living room and kitchen. The house was silent. The air was stale and musty.

  We walked through into the living area. On the right, there was a couch against the near wall. In front of it, there was a coffee table and beyond that, set on a kind of dresser, was a TV. The TV was connected by a cable to a DVD player beneath it, and stacked beside it were hundreds of DVDs, including the entire collection of Murder She Wrote.

  Underneath the coffee table and, as far as I could see, under the sofa too, there was a large, dark stain on the beige carpeting. Dehan whispered half to herself. “They didn’t even clean up his blood. That’s what you call being disowned.”

  I hunkered down and checked the DVD player. It still had the disc in it. I shook my head. “They really haven’t touched a thing. They just closed the door and walked away.”

  “That’s pretty harsh. It takes a special kind of cold to do that.”

  “It does.”

  I pointed at the stain. “That’s where his body was.” I opened up the file and pulled the crime scene photos. “He was lying between the coffee table and the sofa. The knife had been removed, so he bled profusely till he died. He had his head toward the window and his feet toward the kitchen area, lying on his back.”

  She peered at the photograph, then took it from my fingers and positioned herself. “Which means the killer was standing about here, where I am, facing Al…” She frowned and scratched her head.

  I nodded. “That’s one of the problems I’ve been having, too. How does that work? If he’s facing him here, by the sofa, how do the shots wind up in the kitchen…?”

  Dehan shook her head. “No, whoever it is comes in, over there by the door. Either Al lets him in, or he lets himself in. Doesn’t matter right now. They meet, or stop, just over there, between the kitchen and the living area. The intruder pulls his gun. Al panics and they wrestle. The gun goes off, bang bang bang. Al knocks the gun from his hands. As they are wrestling, they turn around. The intruder pulls his knife and stabs Al in the heart.”

  I nodded several times. “You are right. That would seem to be the plausible, obvious explanation. There are just a couple of problems I have. One…”

  I went and stood where she had indicated the shooter would have to be when the shots were fired, where Al and I would have struggled if I had been the intruder. I held out my arm as though it were a gun. “If I fired from here, I would hit the pillar by the side of the breakfast bar. In order to hit the kettle and the plates…” I walked to the center of the floor. “I would need to be standing over here, in the center of the floor, or right…” I crossed the room again. “…here, in the entrance to the kitchen area.”

  “Huh…”

  “Also, my other problem is that when I look at Al lying on the floor in that picture, in that position, I just know: either he just got up from the sofa, or he was about to sit back down on it. That is exactly where he would be. And I, the killer, would be right where I would be if I had just come in and I was chatting with him.”

  “You’re saying he knew his killer. But, sorry, Stone, you’re basing that on pretty slim evidence.”

  “I know.” I nodded. “I’m saying Al might have known, and trusted, his killer.” I gazed into her eyes and smiled. “And I can tell you, sure as eggs is eggs, he knew Ned Brown, but he did not trust him.”

  TWELVE

  The stuff in the kitchen had been left pretty much where the crime scene guys had left it twelve years earlier. There was a plastic kettle beside the sink. It had a neat, 9mm hole in one side, but the whole panel on the other side had shattered, leaving shards of beige plastic strewn across the work surface and in the sink. I repositioned what was left of the kettle, placing it where I would have it if I was Al. While I was doing that, I saw the hole in the wall where the slug had struck home, leaving a spider’s web of cracks across a shattered tile.

  There was a plastic shopping bag in the sink. It contained six medium sized plates. Two were whole, the other four were at various degrees of shattered. I took the debris from the bag, aware of Dehan leaning on the pillar at the end of the breakfast bar, which also formed a kind of entrance to the kitchen.

  I held a whole plate in each hand and stepped back to scan the surface, looking for the obvious place to stack them.

  “What are you doing, Stone?”

  “I’m thinking. He was a big guy, almost four hundred pounds, tall and sixty. Maybe he didn’t like to bend all that much anymore. So these plates, the ones he used most often, he had up here on the work surface.” I glanced at her. “That’s how they got shot.”

  She was peering at me. “I’m afraid to be sarcastic, because I realize you are probably being brilliant.”

  “Not at all.” I put the two plates in what looked to me like the obvious position, and spoke absently. “Flagellate me with the whip of your tongue, scathe me with your scorn…”

  I stacked the broken shards on top of the whole plates. Behind me, I heard her mutter, “Flagellate you with the whip of my tongue…?”

  “We haven’t got the radio. It’s still in evidence. But it was one of those…” I made a rectangular shape with my hands. “Like a big cube of cream plastic with an LED display on the front, and a power cable coming out the back.”

  She nodded, still peering at me, though she was beginning to look curious. I fished through the crime scene photos and found a picture of the radio and placed it where the radio would have stood.

  “Three shots,” I said. “Where did they come from?”

  She glanced at the kettle, the plates and the radio, then glanced around the kitchen and living room. “Well, like you said, they had to be from here in the doorway, or over there in the middle of the floor.”

  I pulled my phone from my pocket and dialed the lab.

  “Hey, Stone, do for you?”

  “I’m at 1932 Ellis Avenue, here in the Bronx. It wa
s a crime scene twelve years ago.”

  “If you’re there, I’m guessing it was never solved and now you want me to solve it for you.”

  “See, Joe, that’s why you got the top job, because you’re smart. There were three shots fired, all apparently in, or into, the kitchen. At the time, the lead detective was pretty sure who the shooter was, and how it all went down, so he never bothered you boys with things like trajectory…”

  He made a noise like somebody just put worms in his tequila. “How much of the original crime scene is intact after twelve years, Stone…?”

  “It is exactly as it was when you guys closed and locked the door in 2007. And I have just placed the kettle and the crockery back as it was when it got shot. Can you do it with lasers? I need to know where the shooter was standing when he fired, and I need this to stick.”

  “Sure, we can do it with lasers for you, John. Would you like a cowgirl in a rhinestone bikini too?”

  “Thanks, I’ve already got one.”

  He laughed noisily.

  “I’ll leave the keys at the station for you. How soon can you do it?”

  “I’ll send a team over this afternoon. Give you a call this evening.”

  “You’re a pal. Thanks, Joe.”

  Dehan was still leaning on the pillar. “You going to tell me what’s on your mind?”

  “Sure.” I shrugged. “I assumed you were wondering the same thing.”

  “Can it.”

  “What was he doing in the kitchen?”

  She frowned. “Aren’t we saying the shots went wide during a struggle?”

  “That’s what Martinez said. I’m seeing three closely grouped shots.”

  “Al was in the kitchen and the guy was shooting at him?”

  I shrugged with my eyebrows. “However I try to explain to myself the movements and the positions of the people in this house on that night, it doesn’t quite make sense.”