by Robert White
The room phone rang while I was packing my shaving gear. I answered it on the third ring. Silence. I said hello but heard nothing. I knew someone was on the line. I could feel it. I said, “Marcus?” Nothing. Dead air.
I had an hour to kill before meeting Marcus. It would be my last contribution to the case. I took out my deck of Solitaire and cheated on every hand.
This time the taxi driver was a woman in her twenties. She said nothing all the way to South Boston. I had her drop me off about a hundred yards from the park entrance Marcus had told me to find. He had said there were three oak trees with crossed branches near the brick entrance. I wondered if witches were hanged elsewhere besides the Commons. The oak trees were all gone, nothing but tourists and vendors selling baseball caps and T-shirts.
I found a park bench about fifty yards inside and read my newspaper and waited for Marcus to show. The Globe and Record both ran retrospectives on the fifteenth anniversary of Jackie Kennedy’s death with photos. Onassis had been dropped from her name throughout the article, and her brother-in-law, the late senator’s funeral oration was quoted again.
I saw a figure in sweats moving toward me, about Marcus’ size. He was walking in a crazy-legged fashion that suggested a drunkard’s movements. Marcus staggered up to me and sat down. His forehead was beaded with sweat. Summer had come all at once, out of nowhere, so I thought he had been jogging a long way in the heat and was exhausted.
He said nothing, staring straight ahead, not looking at me. Two strangers sharing a park bench. Then he slurred something, maybe a name, but I couldn’t make it out.
“What did you say, Marcus?”
He snorted through his nose a couple times and turned to face me and repeated a word that sounded like priest. His breath was rank. The front of his navy-blue sweatsuit glistened where Boston U was lettered, and then I heard him say, “Oh.” By some crazy associational logic, I thought a sewer close by had erupted and then I realized that Marcus had voided his bowels. His eyes were half-shut, and he stopped making that chuffing noise through his nostrils. I put my hand on his neck and felt the worm of a pulse. I pulled open his sweatsuit and saw the holes: three of them, dime-sized, stippled with black around the circumference. Contact wounds. His head lolled forward and that was when he died.
I sat there longer than I should have, but I wanted to make a choice. I knew that someone, maybe the killer, was setting this up. Maybe I was even a part of it. I was sure that Marcus, whatever else he had been, was not the killer of Annaliese O’Reilly. A rage in my guts fought with great fear and made me grasp the ends of the bench and squeeze until my knuckles were white.
Carefully, very carefully—I stood up, pretended to tuck in my shirt while I scanned as far down Mt. Washington as I could see. Christ, Christ, I whispered, a useless mantra under the circumstances. Dozens of late-model cars parked on the street, moving traffic on Necco Street. Nothing unusual to see, and no one was looking in my direction. Couples holding hands, joggers, families out walking on this balmy spring afternoon. I folded my paper and regarded the dead lover of Annaliese a final time before walking all the way to West Broadway for a taxi.
I called Mr. O’Reilly’s father in Roxbury. First, I told him of Annaliese’s death. He said he knew it, read it in the paper that evening; there was nothing in his voice that registered any emotion I could fathom. “What else you want to tell me?” he asked.
“Has anybody called you for information about Annaliese’s whereabouts besides me? Anybody at all, Mister O’Reilly?”
“A priest, he called my wife. He dint give no other information but he say to her Annaliese was safe now.”
“What else did this priest say?”
“He said Annaliese was all right now. He said: ‘Annaliese is safe from the pollution of this world. She will be in her father’s arms soon.’”
Jesus fuck. Priests again.
“Mister O’Reilly, listen. When exactly did that priest call?”
“He called day before yesterday. Very early. I was asleep. He woke up my wife and he told her Annaliese was dead but not to worry no more about her doing bad things.”
“Bad things? This priest said ‘bad things’?”
“He said she’s all right now. She was at peace.”
Jesus Jumping Christ.
Marcus’s death was buried at the bottom of page five in the Boston
Globe under a boldface heading barely larger than standard type size proclaiming that a suspected drug dealer and “associate gang member,” had been found on a park bench by some children playing.
He was shot at close range by a .9 mm automatic. There were no witness, no suspects. What the police beat reporter left out was that there was no real investigation. I suspected as much because Cooney never called me with the news. This was going down on some unlucky South Boston detective’s caseload as uncleared, a real whodunit. Unless somebody turned up to give any description to homicide, always a possibility. But Cooney would clear the Annaliese murder with Marcus Gordon and go on to the next shooting or stabbing in rotation. I couldn’t very well jerk his chain without implicating myself, and there wasn’t much I could do from Ohio. Someone knew the angles. I thought about that silent caller just before Marcus called me. Could it be the same person impersonating a priest to old man O’Reilly?
I had nothing left but questions and not much time. How far had Marcus walked with three slugs in him? It’s a myth that you have to fall down when you’re shot. People get it from TV like everything else. You can walk a long way with bullets in you unless you take one to the brain stem or spinal cord. Even a clipped aorta will allow you fifteen minutes of life before you die. Marcus wasn’t bleeding that much. When I pulled his clothing aside, I saw a fragment of bone protruding. The bullet must have smashed a rib bone and gone on to do other damage without hitting a major organ. If a major artery had been hit, his heart would have pumped his blood out in a couple minutes. It told me one thing: the shooter placed the gun carefully—he wanted Marcus to live a little while. Otherwise, a head shot, gang-style.
Maybe the killer wanted Marcus to keep his appointment in the park . . .
I slept on the flight to Cleveland Hopkins. I remember coming out of fitful sleep to see the interior of the cabin suddenly plunged into darkness as we streaked through clouds the size of skyscrapers. The dappling of light awoke most of my dozing fellow travelers too, and I beheld us all in a chiaroscuro beyond time and motion that lasted and filled me with utter dread until a flight officer with gold chevrons on his sleeve walked past to the tail section. I heard somebody behind me cough and I drifted back into an uneasy sleep.
I was grateful that no one in Cleveland found my car worthy of stealing. I cranked it up and trailed a cloud of blue smoke out of the long-term lot and pointed it toward home. On the Shoreway near East 72nd, I spotted two husky figures carrying objects in their hands midway across the metal walkway above the Martin Luther King, Jr. underpass. I watched them to be sure they didn’t stop. The objects in their hands cylindrical—graffiti artists. I’d investigated a couple homicides where a gang initiation required dropping rocks from there onto cars traveling at seventy-five miles an hour.
That’s when I knew I was going back to Boston. Jack would have called it an epiphanic moment. Two boys walking across a bridge on their way to paint gang graffiti somewhere, maybe go down to the lake’s edge, roll a drunk, terrify some citizens. Last week a man fishing off the breakwater was sodomized by three males. It all made no sense, any of it. Nor did going back to Boston.
I pulled off Interstate 90 at the Mentor exit, the humid air rank with rotting fish, bought a sandwich and coffee at the local McDonald’s, and called O’Reilly. No answer. I drove to his office but one of the maintenance staff told me had not been in all day.
“Had some bad news last week,” one man said. “Told the foreman he wasn’t coming until the end of the week to sign checks.”
I called his house from there again but no answer; the r
ecording machine wasn’t on. Ever since I ceased being a homicide police, I have tried to reacquaint myself with other people’s notions of privacy, but it is a hard habit to break. I hoped that he was—despite what little he gave off over the phone—grieving Annaliese, and I decided to get my business with him done while he was susceptible. I wanted him to bankroll me for another week, send me back to Boston, and let me get closer to the truth of what happened to Annaliese.
I didn’t dare risk his saying no over the phone because I couldn’t afford to return on my own, and I thought a face-to-face conversation with him was necessary. Convince him to bankroll me a week, let me get this thing squared away so I know just a little more than I did then about the circumstances that caused a young girl’s life to go leaking onto a motel floor. Butchered. The pathologist simply confirmed Marcus’ word for it in polysyllabic jargon: Exsanguinated.
He lived in an antique brick-and-wood, two-storey structure set far back from the highway. An expensive landscaping job out front was in progress; a small hill of fresh soil and dozens of bags of peat moss lay next to the house. I saw a Lexus and a Camaro occupying both slots in the garage. The ass-end of the Lexus stuck out too far to close the door, so I figured O’Reilly was coming or going. I practiced my smile climbing the steps, something harder to do every day in this abattoir of a civilization.
No answer. Lights on, nobody home, as they say. Fuck this.
I banged the back door hard enough to wobble the glass panes. Walked the perimeter, looked in the windows. Gave it five minutes of shouting and knocking. Nobody even close enough to hear me.
Contrary to TV, you don’t always use a credit card to slip a latch. You can take off your shoe and hammer the glass, or, as I preferred, a large pipe wrench for emergencies I keep under my seat. I call it Henry. Short for Henry Lee Lucas, serial killer, who with another sleazebag named Ottis O’Toole crisscrossed the US in a killing spree a few years back. I had heard that the ragtag warriors facing Caesar’s disciplined legions used to name their spears before going into battle.
I wrapped the wrench in an old blanket I kept in the trunk and picked my window. Some French windows in the front would enable me to climb through without a lot of muscle. I broke all the glass right down to the glazier points at the top and bottom, reached up, thumbed the lock back and let myself in.
I entered a spacious den. A lot of wood. Ceiling fan. Large-screen TV. The furnace was on despite the warm weather. I traveled from room to room downstairs and went upstairs. Halfway up, it hit me: the smell. I debated whether to leave my jacket on because it’s a smell you don’t get out of your clothes that easily, but it wasn’t bad enough to strip.
Much hotter upstairs. None of the ceiling fans on.
He was in the master bedroom, trussed up in a leather outfit. The faint, sweet smell strong now, a few black flies hovering around his mouth. One had already laid maggots in the corner of his left eye. I watched one walk into and out of his mouth. The heat was accelerating decomposition, but there were large purple splotches on the exposed skin of his lower back and behind his thighs where the blood had settled; another day or so in this heat and the blood would break down, as would the gases inside. His lips had drifted back from his teeth. An empty bottle of Glenfiddich was on the floor.
Both arms were tied in front of him with nylon flexties. The cord around his neck, fastened to an eyebolt behind the door, looked like silk. His bare legs were splayed out in front of him with the bottoms of his feet touching; the rest was suspended a few inches above the floorboards by the cord stretched taut and biting through the flesh of his neck where it had turned black.
I figured that I had time for three rooms. I did all the drawers, bottoms first, in all the dressers but found nothing except some unused cellophane bags under a shirt drawer. There was no bag on the bed or on the floor. No bag anywhere else that might have come off his head if he had flailed around at the last moment before he died. Why, I wondered, would the killer leave so obvious a clue? It made no sense. Everything else said autoerotic asphyxiation. I calculated the time from my Boston call. He drew his last unsober breath on this Earth 36 hours ago.
I did two other rooms and came up with one more item of interest in a secretary with those clever little sleeves secreted behind ornate carvings. O’Reilly sent a considerable amount of money to white supremacist causes, including $500 to the Byron De La Beckwith Defense Fund. There was a personal note of thanks from the defense committee folded around the canceled check. De La Beckwith had even scrawled a spidery “thanks.”
I was beginning to feel as if there were wires to me too. Wondering who could be holding those wires raised the hackles on my neck.
Chapter 6
Feature this: I’m coming out of my office on the Strip, haven’t had a client in five weeks; no rich daddies looking for their wayward kids. The credit cards are maxed out and the bank account is as dry as the Gobi; my credit’s shrunk to zip everywhere but the one place where I have a friend left in the world who will stand me to a drink. I was waiting for Marta to turn on the neon sign to open her husband’s joint, and concentrating on his neon sign to light as I began weaving between cars to cross the street. I nearly get clipped by a convertible and I look up in time to see the gold-toothed smile of Mike Tyson looking down on me. He was seated in the back of a Mercedes convertible with Don King. This is after Robin Givens and before he lost his title to Buster Douglas in Japan. Before the rape conviction and prison sentence, before two more wives, eight children, his cocaine arrest, that goofy WWF wrestling stint, and his IRS woes.
Tyson was the wunderkind of boxing, its brightest star, and elected grand marshal for the opening-day festivities at Jefferson-on-the-Lake. He had come in with King for Memorial Day. Tyson waved to the crowd and tipped a baseball cap with Arabic writing beneath an Islamic logo. His vast manor house down Route 534 wasn’t far from King’s former training camp in Orwell and had IRON MIKE scrolled into the metal arch above the gate. In those days, before Tyson swung on America’s favorite buffoon for stealing him blind, King was vainly trying to keep Mike from all that temptation in New York. That day, antsy and depressed as I was, something so unnerved me about his sudden presence I lost my desire for drink, turned on my heel and went back inside my office and had a long fitful nap full of bad dreams. Existentialists don’t have heroes, but they do have epiphanies and Mike was mine. I think of all that he had done since his boyhood in Bed-Stuy to his conversion to veganism on the Ellen DeGeneres Show and I realize that, my own petty life in comparison, it all ends the same. In a hundred years, none of it matters.
One week after finding the body, I was summoned for another round of questioning by Det. Sgt. Ronald Jones. Jones was an ex-state trooper and one of that five percent of all cops who would have been a criminal if he hadn’t become a cop. I used to wonder how he could give up the fascist black so enamored by the state boys. His message on my machine was polite enough, but if you scraped away the veneer, it was blunt cop talk for “we want to see you now.”
I greeted Phil on my way upstairs and nodded toward a few cubicles to some of my former colleagues who weren’t ashamed to acknowledge me.
Chief Millimaki, as uncouth and unkempt as ever, waved me into his office, so the interrogation was going to be anything but routine.
“There’s a man come all the way from New York City here. You know him from the last time you dragged some business our way.”
On cue, a dapper, fiftyish man with wavy silver hair walked in from the outer office. Trim in his double-breasted suit and a tie I should have thought too loud for the FBI gun-club network of good old boys, I extended my own hand to meet his coming at me.
Special Agent Booth. Damn it.
“Thomas Haftmann, ah, a pleasure to see you again. How many years? Four? You’re looking well.”
“Three,” I said.
“Yeesss.” Dragging it out three syllables as if he couldn’t recall.
“The bureau keeping you busy?�
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“I’ve just returned from a temporary posting in Puerto Rico. Minnesota before that.”
“That’s Pine Ridge,” I said.
“Not many people would know that.” His teeth were still gleaming but I could hear the wheels turn, assessing me. “I headed the regional office in New Mexico before that.”
“Gee, they’ve been moving you around a bit,” I said and made my own smile big.
“They sure have,” Booth said.
Silver tongue to go with his silver hair. Pine Ridge Reservation was the biggest shithole in America outside the South Bronx. Leonard Peltier and the Oglala Sioux Nation have a long memory for the FBI and with good reason. Booth must have stepped on some important toes, or as the feebs say, his elbows got too sharp.
We grinned at each other like two fuckwits. Truth is, Booth should have hated my guts, and he had every reason to. Crap postings in Albuquerque and San Juan, not to mention South Dakota—the toilet for a senior agent whose career parabola had been flawless before he hooked up with me—could only mean one thing. When Booth was agent-in-charge in the hunt for Ohio’s most notorious serial killer, he had given me too much slack and failed to rein me in, and even though the killer was put down in a firefight, he must have been unofficially reprimanded in true FBI style by those sideways promotions to places that rookies out of Quantico got as first assignments.
I thought of the two dead state troopers on the floor of Perry Nuclear Power Plant, one of them sprawled across me, dripping blood in my face, feeling the metal of the gun secreted in his ankle holster so close to my hand if only I can reach it, ah, there, there, got it, that crazy fucker seeing me now . . .