by Lee Lamothe
After she poured a bottle of bath salts into the tub and adjusted the jets, she unclipped her clamshell holster, stripped out of her travelling clothes, and went out naked into the living room. The mini-bar was in a faux Looie Katorz hutch. It was crammed. She selected two little bottles of Bombay gin, dumped them into a glass, and, ignoring the cans of tonic, added tap water. Halfway to the bathroom, she went back to the bar and added another bottle of Bombay. She carried the drink and her holster into the bathroom.
In the tub, with her drink balancing on the edge, she drank and told the ceiling, “Raymundo, you don’t get away this time, not from me, bucko.” She cackled, but felt a stirring of uncertainty. She should have called him, found out what his scene was before she came down to the city. What if he’d hooked up with some tall, blonde, helmeted traffic chick, a vanilla motorcycle rider in bug goggles, jodhpurs, and boots, who rode him like a Harley in a headwind? What if some headquarters clerk with massive knockers had detected the beatnik artist hidden inside Ray Tate and played to it, oohing and ahhing over a killer cop who carried a paintbrush in his holster and acrylics in his handcuff case?
Djuna Brown leaned out of the tub and picked up the phone.
“Yes, Inspector. How may I help you?”
“Is that Gail? Gail, is there a spa in the hotel?”
“Yes, Inspector, the salon is on the second mezzanine. Shall I make you an appointment?”
“Please. The whole nine yards, top to bottom. Say, in a half-hour?”
After getting a genteel pounding and pulling in the massage suite, Djuna Brown sat beside Gail from the check-in desk, who was wearing street clothes in the salon. A masked Vietnamese stylist hummed softly as she buffed. The salon had windows that overlooked the park behind the hotel. The park was abandoned. The salon smelled of emollients and creams. Two women in glowing robes slipped past in slippers, talking in hushed tones. Djuna Brown had only been in a salon once since she left the city the year before, a trip down to Chicago to pick up a Native felon. Before scooping him up, she’d window-shopped at the boutiques along Oak Street, then headed to the Fairmont and had her hair re-spiked and a full body massage. The next morning, the felon, chained to the bar across the backseat, had asked her to crack a window in the truck, saying she smelled like a white woman.
Gail the receptionist looked at the bulge in Djuna Brown’s robe pocket and asked, “Do you have to wear that everywhere?”
“The gun? Yep. Regulations.”
“Did, ah …” The woman seemed fascinated. Djuna Brown thought she was going to ask to see it, to hold it. But she didn’t. “Have you …”
“Used it?” Djuna Brown lied: “No.” Gail seemed disappointed, so she said, “I’ve pulled it a couple of times.”
“Could you? Use it? I mean …”
“Well,” Djuna Brown smiled, “you never know until you need to know.” She resisted the impulse to put Gail on. “How’s it here? You guys busy?”
Gail shook her head. “No. Usually there are five of us working on the desk. Two of them are … They started coughing? There’s the bug, so management transferred them to Minneapolis. You’ve heard about that? The bug?”
“Yep. Some scary shit.”
“And the other girl was … She died?”
“The bug?”
“No.” Gail looked around. “Some guy murdered her. She … He beat her … to … until she was …”
Djuna Brown was going to make a quip, but saw the woman was becoming distraught. She had been going to say, Men, you can’t kill ’em and you can’t use their bones for soup. She wasn’t much of a cook, but she knew you could kill them. Ray Tate had said reassurance was one of the tools in the toolbox. She patted Gail’s hand. “It’ll be okay. He’ll get dropped.” To change the subject, she looked around and said, “You get to use this place much?”
“We’re running about twenty percent, and those checked in are the guests who pre-paid.” She seemed on safer, more stable ground discussing concrete facts. “Management want us all to dress civilian and use the facilities, eat in the dining room, make the place look normal, busy.” Then she licked her lips and she leaned over and whispered. “Is that why you’re here? The bug? They say it’s a Chinese person, smuggled over from Canada, maybe.”
“I don’t know about that. They said, head down to the city, help them carry the water.” She stood up when the manicurist finished her nails. They were perfect. In her arctic robe she was led down a hallway and ushered into to a quiet dark room. It reminded her of the sweat lodge. She wondered if the entire spa experience was based on Native healing culture, a rip-off of a sacred rite by a society that resold it as a frill for rich women at three hundred bucks a pop. Why not, she thought, we’ve taken every other fucking thing.
After the silent attendant massaged oils into her face, adjusted the temperature, dimmed the lights, and set a small pot of potpourri on a heating pad, she closed the door, leaving Djuna Brown alone and naked to decide if she should feel guilty. She lay on the softest of beds wrapped in the thickest of towels in the faintest of wave sounds and wondered if she was wasting State money, dolling herself up like a ga-ga high-school student laying a trap for the football captain.
Ray Tate had probably moved on, she decided. He was a keeper, if you could get past the crusted paint on his hands, his still angst about losing his wife, the absence of his travelling daughter, his bullet scars, and, of course, that he’d killed two black men and a dyke. She herself had never thought she could get past dead black men. They were good shoots, but the optics and the resulting riots had shaken the police brass and the mayor to their core. Ray Tate had been sidelined.
Near the end of the X-men case, a jealous ex-cop dyke had put a few rounds into her Raymundo. “You made me a cop,” she’d told Ray Tate as she lay with him on his futon, careful of the tubes in his body. “Now I have to go back up there. They need policing, those folk. They need a gentle hand.”
But the city did, too. Ray Tate loved his young cops, and feared for them operating in a police culture run by oily sharks, where experienced mentors had been retired off the streets early, leaving insurance adjusters with slide rules and spreadsheets to make life-and-death decisions for cops barely out of their teens.
So she went and he stayed. Both did, separately, what they needed to do, she thought. Neither did, together, what they wanted to do.
Back in her room she felt half her age. Boneless from the working-over she’d had, she lay on the bed, pulling half the duvet up over herself, cocooning. She would, she decided, have to be careful about how she approached Ray Tate. If he was into something with someone, she’d have to determine if their time the year before was a transient situation or something that had a life of its own. Worst case, she decided with a lack of enthusiasm or belief, was she’d snag some hot young charger, bang him stupid, and head back up north to Indian country where she knew love would wither dry like one of the arid pods the grim elders rattled at the hopeful sky.
The phone purred as she was nodding off.
Chapter 7
The task force brainiacs filed in in their power suits, carrying folders and briefing sheets and wearing masks as if they were real cops who actually went out among the public. In the array of chairs only one cop, a tall string-bean black guy from the duty desk, wore his mask on his face. The others, under their chins, on the backs of their heads, over their hair. One guy had it hanging over his crotch like a jockstrap, with a happy face on it.
Ray Tate heard feet shuffling behind him. Chairs squeaked as bodies dropped into them with exhaustion. Someone snored. Someone groaned. He smelled medicated soap and cheap drugstore colognes used to mask, or at least thin out, the sweat of double shifts in closed cars on surveillance jobs and gun-and-runs. As plastic lids were popped or ripped behind him, he smelled coffee. There, too, were girlish scents: emollients, shampoo, cheap perfumes. He felt a stirring and wished he’d gone up to the Projects, mauled the files of the overnight homicides, and foun
d the girl cop with a clothespin on her cute nose. The thought of another night painting and drinking and smoking and waiting for morning depressed him.
As the brainiacs huddled at the front of the room, someone a few rows in front of him expounded on night-vision scopes as a tool to stop the migrants. “We anchor some barges out in the river, put some dead-eye musketeers on them with HKs and night scopes. A snakehead comes over the river with a load of Chinamen, pliinkkkk, we cooks his rices for him.”
“Nice, Tim. Except we don’t got night scopes. We don’t got HKs. We don’t got barges. We don’t got anchors.”
Someone else said, “The loony mayor got us nice new bicycle lanes up and down Martyrs’ Hill, though. The loony mayor got us bicycle racks on front of the new buses. The loony mayor got us ...”
A breathtaking blonde clerk in a short skirt swayed across the front of the podium and opened a brown envelope. She tacked a photo of the latest victim to an easel and there was instant silence. The clerk stared at the photograph for a moment, made a choked sound, then quickly walked away with her head down. The victim’s face was misshapen, her lips were ballooned, one eye was gone in a purple explosion above her left cheek. Her nose lay sideways on her right cheekbone. Ray Tate thought of nothing so much as the fractured mirror of a Picasso painting. Tubes ran from her nostrils and a thick piece of plastic was taped to the corner of her mouth.
Beside him, Brian Comartin muttered, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, that poor little girl. Ah, Jesus Fucking Christ.” He took a shaky breath and seemed near tears. “I’m gonna kill this guy.”
Ray Tate put a hand on his shoulder and wondered if he was looking at his own near future, a fat globe in upper middle age, not sure if he could carry the water any longer, living out a ghost life in the cavernous headquarters with a slide rule in his ankle holster.
The chief of detectives took to the podium. Reluctantly, he slipped his mask down. He gazed over the slumping, yawning troops in their rumpled clothes and couldn’t keep the disdain off his face. “Okay, everybody wake up, have ears. We’re keeping this one shrink-wrapped, nothing outside this room. We’ve got three dead women and we’ve got this one found unconscious today. All were beaten. No sex assault, no robbery that we can figure out. Today’s survivor and one of the other dead three were found by the riverbank. The other two were at various locations downtown.
“The highlights are, as I said, all young female African-Americans, all beaten to pulp, no weapon used that we can tell, no apparent robbery, no molestation. So, no apparent motive. Which means we might be looking at the racial aspect as the connector. We like the Volunteers for this. They’re out all over town in their stupid red caps, and down by the river. They’re very, very viable.
“The current victim might be our breakout. She was found this morning when some boaters were walking along the river. Her prints aren’t on file. She’s not a missing.
“So, today’s vic remains unidentified. She had no ID, just some house keys, locks unknown. The good news is she’s alive. Bad news, she’s comatose, possible severe brain injury, so when she wakes up she might give us something to go on, or she might start reciting Willie Nelson lyrics in Swahili.” He smirked, shrugging in a boys-to-boys grin, and when he saw he was facing grim rows of iron faces staring at the victim and not at him, he cleared his throat. “Okay, anyway, we can’t wait to find out. We’re going to take this one apart.” The Chief of Ds looked around the room. “The folks who found her said it sounded like she was asking about her dog, Harris, or something. If she was walking her dog on the banks, probably she lived in the area. If she doesn’t live in the area, she drove, so a team of cadets from the academy will start doing licence tags on the surrounding streets, looking for something that hasn’t moved in two days. Maybe look for abandoned bicycles. They’ll also work the vets and clinics in the area, talk to dog walkers. Someone knows her, someone knows the dog, Harris. With a little police work we should be able to put a house around her.
“That’s new, that’s the fresh stuff. A Homicide team is setting up. We’ve got forensics down at the latest crime stage. The Volunteers were out last night patrolling for migrant boats and they left some beer bottles and other printable debris along the riverbank. That’s at the lab. We’re doing canvassing. Intelligence is doing workups on the main players in the Volunteers and you’ll be given targets first thing tomorrow. It’ll mean double shifts, hard luck, kids, but there’s nothing I can do about it. We’re all maxing out, we’re all beat, we suck it up. You guys are the enforcement arm of this thing. Don’t worry about the investigative side. Concentrate the eyeballs on the Volunteers.” He looked pleased with himself, a man in command. His cheeks were closely shaven, his eyes were clear, and he wore the power authority suit of the brass, a deep blue three-piece over a snowy shirt and solid blue tie that wouldn’t strobe in television lights. “Questions, suggestions, obs, so far?”
A woman called, “We putting out a public notice? People should know there’s a public danger. Especially black women.”
“We’re working around to it, Marty. We don’t want to spook the Volunteers before we take them down.” He looked around. “Anyone else? Got obs, ideas, questions?”
“No, Chief. No, man.” The same woman called, again, sounding distraught. “We have to notify. We didn’t do it back in ’04 and that guy got more women before we got him. City’s still paying the lawsuit by the families of those victims.”
“I know, Marty, I know. We’re working something out. Anyone else?”
“Yeah, Chief, I got some obs.” A bow-legged, red-headed gunslinger from the robbery squad stood up. His Montreal Canadiens jacket was slung over the back of his chair, he wore a double brace of semi-automatics in a worn shoulder rig, and the handle of a compact revolver jutted from the back of his blue jeans. He wore his mask backwards on the back of his neck with OH FUCK OFF scrawled on it in grease pen. “I observe I’m fucking whipped. We been going around the clock, some of us, for more than a week with this understaffing bullshit and doing gun-and-runs and I further observe, Chief, that except for sleeping in my car, I haven’t slept at all. I observe, Chief, also that with the plague out there we’re down about forty percent street manpower and I further observe, with respect, this whole fucking thing is a dog’s breakfast and we’re the fucking dog.” The gunslinger wasn’t big but he was wiry and coiled with frustration and exhaustion. He’d put three roving French-Canadian bandits toes-up during a single bank robbery. The holdup squad up in Montreal had sent him the hockey jacket. Except for Ray Tate, who’d done a trifecta, although not all at one time, he was the only other gunman on the force who’d wiped three shadows off the wall.
“Okay, Steve, okay. Noted.” The Chief of Ds looked around for raised hands. “Anybody else?”
The ginger gunslinger remained standing and continued as if the Chief of Ds hadn’t said anything. “And I further observe, Chief, that you and that Chinaman police chief and that fucking mayor all showed up this morning on the TV looking pretty snappy, like you’d been at a restful spa for a week or two, napping flat out on your back like human beings, then getting all barbered up for the cameras. You tired, Chief? You get your beauty rest last fucking night when I was sitting in the Brickworks pissing in a paper cup? Observe me that one.”
“Ah, ah, also noted.” The Chief of Ds licked his lips. He wasn’t going to tangle with a gunslinger with three notches on his gun butt. He looked around and focused on the tall masked black detective seconded from the duty desk. “Marcus, questions, obs?”
The tall detective stood up and reluctantly slipped down his mask. “What are we supposed to do about OT? I got about a hundred overtime hours in and —”
Someone yelled, “Sit down, you fucking ass meatball.”
Someone called, “You do-dick motherfucker.”
The tall detective turned, “Hey, I know it’s tough this girl’s in a coma, but, hey, I’m not, and my family’s gotta eat, right?”
A woman’s voic
e from behind Ray Tate shouted, “Sit down, you fucking duty-desk hump-assed motherfucker.”
There were hoots and hisses.
Another woman charger yelled, “Yeah, have some fucking respect, you fucking double douche.”
The black detective said to the Chief of Ds, “What the fuck was she doing, Chief, going out alone, down by the river? At night? How stupid was she?”
“Yo,” a woman’s voice from the back of the room said. “Whoa the fuck up.”
The tall black detective turned his head and looked into the rows behind him. “You think she’s bright, this one, Marty? The river? At night? She’s a dumb enough to be a kiddie cop.”
A uniformed black woman from the Youth Services team launched herself through two rows of chairs, her shoulder taking him in the kidney, sacking him as if he were a daydreaming quarterback. Both went down. Chairs clattered and skittered across the tile floor. The Chief of Ds stepped away from the podium and pulled up his mask as though he didn’t want to be polluted by the scent of sudden cop violence.
“Ten bucks on the chick, Picasso,” Comartin said to Ray Tate. “You think she likes iambic pentameter?”
Ray Tate laughed. He watched the Chief of Ds and the task force leaders look at one another. The woman from Youth sat on the detective’s chest, her knees pinning his arms down, rocking it to him first-class with a measured metronome of thoughtful lefts and rights. It was bloody, there were teeth. It sounded like meat. “No bet.”
Four buff heavies from the door squad casually stepped into it. It took three of them to move the youth officer off the duty-desk hump. She really didn’t want to leave the job unfinished. Ray Tate could tell the doormen just loved the black woman, they were talking softly to her, calling her Marty, patting her over to make sure she wasn’t injured. She was swearing and heaving. The fourth doorman slung the limp detective over his shoulder and headed for the door, whistling.