The Girl Who Ran Off With Daddy

by David Handler

  “And this is my property, my pond and my friend,” I snarled back at him. “So either give me a hand, Trooper, or call someone who will.”

  He didn’t budge, flaring his nostrils at me. Then he said, “I’ll get the fire department. One of ’em’s got a truck got a big winch on it.”

  Lyme’s fire department was an all-volunteer one. Slawski raised somebody over the radio in his cruiser. Then he reported in to the Westbrook Barracks of the Connecticut State Police. Two members of the fire department showed up in less than five minutes, one of them behind the wheel of the mondo tow truck from Doug’s Texaco. Dwayne Gobble came zipping up the drive in his own truck a few seconds after them, greatly agitated.

  “Billy here’s my neighbor,” he explained to me in a frantic, high-pitched voice. “I-I was helping him with some yard work when he got the call. I-I can’t believe it’s him. I mean, it can’t be Mr. Gibbs.”

  “It’s him all right, Dwayne. I’m sorry.”

  I moved the Rover out of the way and Billy backed up the tow truck. Dwayne waded in and felt around in the water until he found something to hook the winch chain onto. Then he gave Billy the signal and they pulled Thor Gibbs out. He didn’t come out easily. He’d been chained by the waist to one of the old iron wagon wheels that had been part of the carriage barn’s vintage contents. He was facedown; the back of his bald head was bashed in. His jeans were down around his ankles. Slawski motioned for Dwayne to turn him over. That’s when we made the unpleasant discovery that Thor Gibbs had been Bobbitted—his penis had been cut clean off.

  “Damn!” Dwayne gasped.

  The rest of us just stared.

  Clethra started screaming. Merilee immediately took her inside.

  “Damn!” Dwayne gasped again, louder this time.

  Slawski shook his head. “Why would somebody want to do that?”

  “You don’t really need an answer to that, do you?” I said.

  He shot me a look. “Lousy hiding place for a body, water being so shallow. Bound to happen on him eventually.”

  “There are several possible explanations for that,” I suggested.

  “Such as?”

  “Whoever did it was in a real hurry. Or they panicked. Or they wanted us to find him.” I tugged at my ear. “Or maybe they were just really stupid—you have to consider all of the possibilities.”

  Another uniformed trooper pulled up the drive in his cruiser, followed by an EMS van. They got out, radios squawking.

  “Gibbs was here all alone?” Slawski asked me.

  “From ten until noon.” I frowned. “The driveway was all wet when we got home.”

  “It be raining,” he pointed out, his eyes on the heavens.

  “I know that, Trooper. But it hadn’t been raining for very long when we pulled in. If someone had come here and gone you’d think there would have been a dry patch where their car had been parked. But the driveway was completely wet.”

  “Meaning what, exactly?” he asked me, with mounting impatience.

  “I’m not sure, exactly.”

  Lulu started barking like crazy from the direction of the woodshed. I made right for her, Slawski trailing me. She was standing in the open doorway yapping at the six-pound sledgehammer that hung on the wall next to the ax, caked with dirt and blood and hair. Blood was splattered all over the shed’s dirt floor. A path had been smoothed out from something heavy, like a body, being dragged across it.

  “Whoever did it used that sledge, Trooper,” I said. “Then wrestled him into the cart and wheeled him down to the pond.”

  Lulu snarfled at me from my feet. She wanted some stroking. I patted her and told her she was a good girl, my eyes scanning the shed. There was no sign of the weapon that had been used to Bobbitt him. No sign of his severed penis either. But there was an empty holster hanging inside the doorway. The Felco spring-action pruners that belonged in it were missing.

  “When you drag the pond for his penis you may find a pair of Felcos,” I informed Slawski.

  He took off his hat and examined the brim. He looked much closer to twenty than thirty with it off. “Wonder why he’d hide them but leave the sledge here?”

  “You’re thinking it’s a he?”

  He stuck out his lower lip, considering it. “Victim was a big man. Take a big person to move him.”

  “Or more than one person,” I countered. “After all, more than one person wanted Thor dead.” Like Baby Ruth, who’d already tried to kill him once. Like Marco, who’d specifically told me he thought someone should rid Thor of his troublesome schlong. Like Barry, whose daughter the old lion had defiled—or so everyone had been led to believe. All three happened to be out for the weekend. No way this was a coincidence. No way.

  “Like who?” he wondered.

  Lulu moseyed shyly over to Slawski’s cruiser, anxious for some approval from Klaus. He was, after all, a pro. But he ignored her completely, the bum.

  “Like who?” Slawski repeated, louder.

  “Like lots of people, Trooper,” I answered. “Don’t you read the newspaper?”

  “Why, don’t you think I can?” he demanded icily.

  “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

  “I know shit.”

  A whole convoy came tearing up the drive now—a cruiser, an unmarked cruiser, a medical examiner’s van and two big blue-and-white Major Crime Squad cube vans. Four burly investigators wearing Connecticut State Police windbreakers and baby blue latex gloves jumped out of those and went to work sealing off the area. They worked soundlessly and efficiently, wasting no time. They had done this sort of thing together before. A distraught Dwayne lingered there on the periphery in his wet clothes, watching them, wanting to do or say something. But there was nothing to do or say, so he got in his truck and drove off.

  A plainclothesman climbed out of the unmarked cruiser, hitched up his trousers and looked around at the place as if it were not quite up to his standards.

  Slawski stiffened noticeably at the sight of him. “Damn, this be about bad shit now.” He glanced at me uncertainly, as if he wanted to confide in me but had no reason to believe he could. “Watch my back, will ya?”

  “Your back, Trooper?”

  The plainclothesman spotted Slawski. He started across the yard toward us, not moving particularly fast.

  “Don’t be dealing your piffle on me now, man,” pleaded Slawski, his voice rising with urgency. “We be about team now. About sticking together. Just do this for me, okay? I’ll school ya after the man’s gone.”

  The man was in his mid-forties and none too happy about it, or about something. His whole face was a gray mask of dread and anxiety. He had a wet, puckered scar of a mouth that turned down at the corners, worry lines like crinkles in old newsprint, eyes that were bleary and pouchy. And the left one had a tremor in it. He had thinning hair of no particular color and a body of no particular shape, unless lumpish counts as a shape. He had on a three-piece suit made out of something cheap and shiny and a raincoat made out of something cheap and dull. “Well, well, if it isn’t my homeboy, Tyrone,” he jeered in that flat, nasal working-class New England accent that belongs to New Britain, Connecticut, and nowhere else. Nowhere else wants it. “How they hangin’, superstar?”

  “Lieutenant Munger,” Slawski grunted. Nothing more.

  “What you got for me?” Munger growled at him irritably. “What’s so hot, vis-à-vis I gotta get outta my nice warm fucking bed on a fuckin’ Sunday?”

  “What you’ve got, Lieutenant, is a murder,” I said.

  He eyed me with cold contempt. “The fuck are you?”

  “Stewart Hoag,” Slawski said. “He the one found the body.”

  “Stewart Hoag, the writer?” He looked me and my wet clothes over, unimpressed. “Geez, you’re not what I expected.”

  “That’s funny, Lieutenant. You’re exactly what I expected.”

  “What, you live here?”

  “What, I live here.”

  “Yo
u fucking kill him?”

  “He was my friend,” I replied, hefting the clunky bracelet on my wrist.

  “That’s not what I asked you. I asked you if you fucking killed him.”

  “May I have your full name and badge number, please?”

  “What for?”

  “I want to report you to your superiors for being rude and abusive and for using foul language at the scene of a crime when one of the victim’s relatives is well within earshot. I don’t know where you usually are when you behave in this manner, Lieutenant, but you aren’t going to behave this way here.”

  Slawski drew his breath in and stared straight ahead, stone-faced.

  Munger held his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Hey, hey, no need to get your bowels in an uproar.”

  “My bowels are perfectly fine. I’d like your name and badge number, please.”

  “Chick Munger,” he said between his teeth, which were yellow. “Central District Major Crime Squad, out of Meriden.” He took his badge out and held it so I could see the number. “You got any complaints, you go ahead and you call ’em. But I just pulled the week from hell, okay? Didn’t get to bed until five in the morning. Sorry if I came off insensitive.”

  “You didn’t come off insensitive, Lieutenant. You were insensitive.”

  He grimaced wearily. “I apologize, okay? We cool now? You got it all out of your system?”

  “Drained and flushed,” I said curtly.

  “Beautiful.” He turned his red-rimmed eyes back to Slawski. “Talk to me.”

  Slawski talked to him, Munger making notes on a small pad as the resident trooper hit the high points. When he got to the part about the woodshed Munger went and had a look for himself. “Victim in any fights lately?” he wanted to know.

  Slawski cleared his throat. “Well, yes.”

  “Where and when?”

  “In my professional opinion,” Slawski replied, “I would regard that particular altercation as inconsequential.”

  Or was it? Kirk and the others were plenty mean, according to Dwayne. Especially if they smoked illy. I wondered if Slawski knew they did. I wondered if they’d decided to finish what Thor had started yesterday. I wondered.

  “I don’t recall asking you for your professional opinion, Tyrone,” Munger informed him brusquely. “Where and when?”

  Slawski swallowed, his jaw muscles hardening. “He got in a big fistfight yesterday with a bunch at Slim Jim’s, on the Old Post Road.”

  “You file a report on it?”

  “I did.”

  Munger peered at my swollen nose, his left eye tremoring as if someone had poked at it with a sharp stick. “You were in it?”

  “I was.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “He tried to get them to reach out and touch their wild selves.”

  “Their what?”

  “He was taunting them,” I explained.

  Munger considered this, brightening. “Well, maybe he struck a nerve.”

  “He often did.”

  “Okay, good,” concluded the lieutenant, pocketing his notepad. “We move fast we can button this up by nightfall.” He seemed eager to prove Slawski wrong. Most eager.

  “I should like to remain an active participant in this investigation, Lieutenant,” Slawski spoke up. “I believe I can be of some particular assistance.”

  “Appreciate the offer, Tyrone,” Munger said pleasantly. “Only, resident troopers give way to Major Crime vis-à-vis all homicides, unless otherwise requested. And I’m not otherwise requesting, okay? So stay out of my way, okay?” he added, not so pleasantly. “Next of kin been notified?”

  “They’re in Essex,” I said. “I can tell them.”

  “We can tell them,” Slawski corrected me.

  “Beautiful.” Munger started back toward the pond, then stopped, scratching his head. “Guy was a celebrity, right? One who slipped it to … who ran off with his own daughter?”

  “Stepdaughter,” I said.

  “That explains it, then.” Munger pointed down to the road, where a dozen news vans were already crowded into the ditch. “TV stations in Hartford and New Haven listen in on our calls. Tabloid shows’ll be here soon. Place is gonna be a zoo.” The prospect of so much media attention seemed to tickle him. I did not, I decided, have much use for this man. “We can keep a trooper at the drive if you like,” he offered.

  “I’d like.”

  He grimaced. He did that a lot. “Consider it done.”

  Slawski watched him go back to his car, glowering at him. “That dumb ass Slim Jim’s lead oughta keep him out of my hair for a while anyway. Gimme a chance to find out what really went down. C’mon, we’ll take my ride.” He started toward his car, moving briskly.

  “So what exactly are you, Trooper, some kind of hot dog?”

  Lulu let out a low growl. She hates that expression.

  “Man got hisself done in my ’hood on my watch,” Slawski replied. “That makes it my responsibility. I take my responsibility very serious—and what Munger or anyone else says about it don’t mean shit to me.” He shot me a look. “Why, you got some particular difficulty with that?”

  “Not at all. In fact, we may even be birds of a feather.”

  He let out a snort. “I be disbelieving that.”

  I ducked into the house before we left. Merilee and Clethra were drinking coffee at the kitchen table, Merilee holding Clethra’s hand and talking to her in a low voice. They both looked up when I came in—Clethra hopefully, as if maybe I was about to tell her it was all some kind of terrible mistake, that Thor wasn’t dead, that he was still out there roaring like a lion somewhere. But then her eyes clouded back over and she ducked her head, sniffling.

  “I’m going to Barry’s house with the trooper to tell everyone what happened,” I informed her. “Would you like to come?”

  “I want to stay here with Thor,” she moaned.

  “He’s not here anymore, honey,” Merilee told her gently. “His body is, but he’s gone.”

  “I wanna stay!”

  “That’s perfectly okay,” I assured her. “But your mom has to be told, and it would mean a lot to her if you—”

  “What do you mean, told?!” Clethra cried scornfully. “She’s the one who did it!”

  “You don’t know that,” I said.

  “Oh, yes I do,” she said with cold certainty. “She couldn’t stand it, okay? She couldn’t stand that he wanted me more than he wanted her, okay? So she took him from me, okay?” Tears were streaming down her face, which had become red and blotchy. “The bitch. The horrible, dried-up bitch. I hope they fry her!”

  Merilee and I exchanged a look.

  “I have some bad news for you,” I said to her. “The press has descended on us. They’re stationing a trooper at the foot of the drive, but …”

  She let out a huge, unhappy sigh. “Very well, darling. We’ll stay in the house.” She wanted to say more. I knew that. She wanted to blame me for bringing all of this into our lives. She wanted to blow. But it is at moments like these that you measure a person’s worth, and Merilee Nash was twenty-four-karat gold.

  I changed into dry clothes. When I came back outside Slawski was sitting behind the wheel of his cruiser, watching the Major Crime people photograph the body.

  “Will Klaus mind if I bring my partner along?” I asked him through the open window.

  Slawski looked around, puzzled. “Partner? What you talkin’ about, partner?” Then he froze, a pained expression crossing his face. “Uh-huh. You be talking about yo dog, don’t ya?”

  Lulu showed him her teeth.

  “What’s her problem now?” he wanted to know.

  “She prefers not to be called a dog.”

  “Well, I don’t care what she prefers. She ain’t coming.”

  “We’re a team. We always work together.”

  “Maybe so, but she ain’t coming,” he said stubbornly.

  “She found the murder weapon, didn’t she?” Which w
as a helluva lot more than Klaus had done so far.

  “Look, it’s against regulations for me to transport another canine when Officer Klaus is in the vehicle.”

  “Like it’s against regulations for you to pursue a case on your own when you’ve been told not to?”

  “Get in,” he muttered, exasperated.

  “If you’d rather I can take my own car and—”

  “Get in!”

  We got in. He rammed it into gear and took off down the drive, barreling right through the gaggle of pushy reporters and cameramen clustered down there at the edge of the road. The Enquirer and The Star were there now. Hard Copy and A Current Affair and Inside Edition were there, too. They’d traveled fast. Birds of prey tend to.

  Lulu rode in between us, sniffing gleefully at Slawski’s radio and shotgun. She loves riding in cop cars. Klaus remained in back, ignoring her. He was on duty and—let’s get it out in the open—Mr. Warmth he wasn’t. We’re talking somewhat less personality than a horse and somewhat more than broccoli rabe. I hoped she didn’t get impatient with him and blow it. I hoped he didn’t mind them short and neurotic.

  “Tell her not to be messing with my stuff,” Slawski said irritably. “Don’t see Klaus sticking his nose where it ain’t wanted. He’s a trained police officer. And, damn, what’s that smell?”

  “She has rather unusual eating habits.”

  “What’s she eat, pond scum?”

  “Why, you got a problem with that?”

  “Won’t catch Klaus eating nothing but red meat.”

  “Raw or cooked?”

  “Cooked good and proper.”

  “Do you ever pet him or make kissy-face noises at him? In an appropriately manful manner, I mean.”

  Slawski hit the brakes, bringing the cruiser to a screeching halt right there in the middle of Joshua Town Road. “Look, man, I ain’t in the mood for none of your piffle,” he said with quiet menace. “So just stop flapping them gums and you and me’ll get along fine.”

  “You mean there are people who actually get along with you?”

  “Eventually. Unless they be disrespecting me.”

  “You mean like Munger?”

  At the mention of the lieutenant’s name, he tensed up. “If this was my investigation,” he said between his teeth, “we’d be taking soil samples from these folks’ shoes right now.”