Stern leaned forward to peer through the microscope. Fade didn’t need to look to know what Stern was seeing: two bullets nearly identical, pressed back to back, one with uniform parallel markings, the other with an additional set of rougher scratches, concealing any similarity between the two. “How is he doing that?” Stern asked.
“A drill—at least, that’s my assumption.” He gestured to the guns on his desk. “The inside of the barrels are a mangled mess of inconsistent grooves, which might indicate a drill. I doubt it could be anything else.”
“Which means there’s no way to prove whether your collection and the murders are connected,” Stern concluded, his mustache rocking back and forth.
Fade nodded, a satisfied smile in the corner of his lip. Stern was catching on. “Or for that matter why he’s killing these men in the first place.”
“Could be an assassin,” Din said with a shrug, “seeing as his victims have only been gangland thugs.”
Fade shook his head and began pacing the room. “Plausible, but unlikely. Assassins have been known to leave calling cards, but they don’t exactly go looking for publicity. And mailing your murder weapon to the number one columnist—no, not columnist—number one press-hired detective in the world isn’t exactly what one would call subtle. This guy has a vendetta—or believes he has one—which is why he’s mailing me.” He paused and turned to Stern. “We have to face the fact that there are going to be more victims before we stop him. You have to understand: He wants to be heard.”
Din smiled grimly as she flipped to a blank page. “Then I guess we better start listening.”
Chapter 2
FAN MAIL
Though he was off by two thousand, the Planet circulation jumped as Fade predicted. The murders had become the talk of the town, with two more occurring over the last month. The fourth victim, Matthew Weglian, had been found three weeks prior, sprawled out on the subway tracks below 34th Street, a gunshot wound to the back of the head. The other papers, prestigious and otherwise, had begun looking for a psychopath to call their own in a desperate effort to bump up sales, thankfully to no avail.
Owner and publisher Gubb Hackrox threw the latest copy of the Planet on to the conference room table. “‘The Post Box Killer Strikes Again,’” he said, pointing to the headline, a bit more proudly than Fade cared for. Gubb then looked at Din sharply. “That was my idea. Going on the record for that one. Sure, he doesn’t use the post box to kill, but the mugs who read us aren’t the brightest bulbs on the chandelier.”
“If it really is a ‘he,’” Din commented, her cigarette hanging from the corner of her lip. She looked over the copy and frowned. “You forgot to proof this sentence. It should read: ‘The fifth victim, David Guida, was found stuffed in a drain pipe.’ It says ‘stuffed on a drain pipe.’”
Gubb waved this away. “‘On,’ ‘in;’ you shoulda proofread it yourself, lady. Besides the mugs won’t notice. Bless ’em if they can read and not look at the pictures like it’s the goddamn funny pages. Man or woman, the mugs reading us keep on spikin’. A few more weeks of this and the Times and Herald-Tribune are going to go out of business. You should see the letters we have coming in. They love this guy—or gal—running around taking out criminals. They say no one likes a vigilante, but our numbers are provin’ ’em wrong.” He glanced at Fade, who was walking over to the window. “What’s wrong with you? Your stock jumps with every new paper we sell.”
Fade touched his forefinger to his lips, watching the miniature people flow through the streets in rivers and streams. He had five guns now, a High Standard Model “B” and a Fabrique Nationale Model 1900, both following the pattern of scoured serial numbers and drilled barrels, now added to the lot. As before, the notes that accompanied them had the number of the victim alongside the make and model of the gun and the location of the body. It was the killer’s choice of quotes, however, that had grown increasingly more disturbing. Just as the first had been a quote from one of the earliest stories about Fade, these had been pointed statements taken out of context, giving his hyperbolic, high-minded words a darker, malevolent spin. “Crime, in all its forms, falls within Fade’s crosshairs, and his aim never waivers.” “The victims, murdered as they were, only hinted at the vile depths to which Fade’s enemies would go.” Fade pinched his eyes shut, seeing the words typed out across the back of his eyelids.
“There’s going to be another murder soon,” he said aloud, as much to himself as to the others.
Gubb furrowed his brow as he lit up his cigar. “Should we feel sad?”
Fade gazed at Gubb reproachfully.
“He’s got a point, Fade,” Din said. “Your pen pal is killing the bad guys. Last time I checked that qualifies him as one of the good ones.”
Fade placed his hands in his pockets and sighed. “And what happens when he stops being so picky?”
Din shoved her cigarette into the ashtray with a twist of her wrist. “Psychopaths usually follow a pattern. Jack in Whitechapel liked to cut up girls. Ours just happens to hunt the scum of the Earth. We should count ourselves lucky.”
Fade threw out his arms. “Look, I’m not saying I’m sitting around sobbing over the deaths of a bunch of gangsters. Hell, they already like to kill themselves as it is. We’re better off with less of them running around, but they’re still people, some of them even had families. Our… Post Box Killer,” he said, the name somehow tasting wrong on his tongue, “is starting to set a precedent and not a good one. We don’t stop him soon, it’ll open the floodgates and people will start thinking it’s a decent idea to go out and kill people without any regard to the law. No one likes a vigilante?” He tapped his long index finger against the conference table. “This keeps up we’ll have a city full of them.”
Din took a deep breath and her eyes dropped to her feet, conceding the point. “Fine,” she said. “What’s the plan? You usually have one of those.”
Fade arched his eyebrow. “Do I? Here I just thought I was flying by the seat of my pants.”
Gubb puffed his cigar and shrugged. “As long as everything makes it into print I don’t care what you two do, so long as it’s interesting.”
“Don’t worry, Gubb,” Fade assured him with a grim smile, “we’ll be sure to keep it entertaining.”
***
There was a distinct smell of diesel as they dragged him through the darkness. At least he assumed it was darkness, for all he knew it was bright lights and neon signs outside the burlap sack. He could hear the strong men beginning to grunt from exhaustion. Fade was a narrow piece of work, but at his height even skin and bones started to weigh a man down.
The sixth gun—a Remington 51—had arrived a week ago, mailed in a shoebox stuffed with clippings of the first Post Box Killer article. The note, which Fade had now come to dread as much as the drilled out sidearm, had cut him deep. Containing a quote from his and Din’s second article, the killer made his stance clear: “Fade’s mission may not always be condoned by those of you reading these words, but know that he is always fighting on your behalf.” The police had found the victim shortly after, a hoodlum named Alfonso Brown, propped up against a lamppost just south of Harlem, a bullet to the back of the skull.
Fade’s captors’ footsteps began to echo back. They were somewhere big and empty, which was never a good sign. They lifted him up, tucked in his knees and dropped him down onto a wooden chair too short for his legs. A moment passed before the burlap sack flew off Fade’s face, white spots and silhouettes slowly resolved into a dozen distinct people standing around him in a large pool of light. Fade recognized a few: Joe the Barbar, Frank Costello, Bumpy Johnson, Willie Moretti, Joe Adonis, Pete Barry, “Lepke” Buchalter, James Nord, and Bugsy Siegel. The other faces rang a bunch of bells in the back of his head, but the names escaped him. Other fedora capped men stood in the shadows, Tommy guns slung at their sides.
“All of you just to see little old me? Jeez, you sure know how to make a girl feel special. I’m about to blus
h.”
“Thanks for taking the time to meet with us, Mr. Fade,” Pete Barry said, stepping forward, “seeing as how we don’t usually get along.”
Fade smiled pleasantly. “Hey, as long as you read the Planet, you’re a friend of mine. And seeing as we’re all friends you mind undoing these ropes?” he asked, holding up his bound hands.
Barry looked behind Fade. “Johnny, could you?” he said with a wave of his hand.
A six-foot-ten enforcer, who Fade recognized as Johnny “Wits” Pomatto, walked over, switchblade in hand. “Don’t move too quick,” Pomatto said in a baritone, the blade flipping out. He gave Fade a toothy yellow grin. “Don’t wanna cut you,” he said before slicing through the rope around Fade’s wrists in two quick motions.
“Thank you kindly,” Fade said with a nod, massaging his wrists. He looked to the mob heads surrounding him and felt something turn over inside him. If the killer’s goal had been to further organize organized crime, he had succeeded in spades. “Well, seeing as we’re all here together in this epic meeting of the minds, someone want to offer me a drink or are we going to have to go straight to business?”
“First thing I want to get out of the way,” Costello said, crossing his arms. “Tell us honestly, Mr. Fade, you the Post Box Killer? Would make life a lot simpler if you just came out with it and saved us all the trouble.”
Fade leaned forward, resting his right hand on his knee. “Yes, I arranged this whole meeting to confess my crimes. Do you have a priest on hand? I’d like my last rites, because I’m about to die from a case of infectious idiocy. Symptoms include shrinkage of the brain and drooling of the mouth. It’s viral, so you all might not want to get to close to Mr. Costello there; he’s our patient number zero. And Johnny Pomatto here just got a big ol’ whiff of it. No offense, mind you, but there must be something incredibly stupid floating in the air if you honestly think I could be that insane.”
“You about done, Mr. Fade?” Nord asked, his sallow face looking like a Death’s Head.
“I’ve got a few more witticisms lined up, but we can save them for later.”
“Tell us what you know about the Post Box Killer that we don’t,” Buchalter said. “And for the sake of time, keep it short.”
“Fine,” Fade said with a shrug. “Nothing.”
“Don’t try and pull our leg, Mr. Fade,” Barry said. “You’re the one this freak has been mailing his pieces to.”
Fade gave him an exaggerated nod. “That’s right, but I take it you haven’t been reading the Planet too closely, have you now? Outside the guns, the notes, and the location of the bodies, I’m just in the dark as you all. More so, probably. It’s very frustrating.”
The mobsters glanced at one another in turn, their faces a mixture of apprehension and doubt.
“It’s not that we’re short on men, you understand, Mr. Fade,” Johnson said. “We’ll always find someone to pick up a gun fer us. It’s just bad for morale, you see. First we all thought it was between us, the usual business, turf warfare and whatnot.”
“Almost like he’s taking one from each of us,” Costello added. “Like he’s trying to send a message.”
“We don’t need someone going after us that’s not supposed to,” Moretti added. “Cops, you, we understand that. We don’t like it, but we understand it. That’s how this game works. But some nut bag running around taking us out like we’re deer for the hunt? That’s just not gonna work fer us.”
“Must be hard for you,” Fade said with a little more than a drop of sarcasm. “Listen, fellas, I’m loving this psychoanalytic session, it would make Sigmund Freud real proud, but let’s skip the Oedipal complex, and get to the part where you tell me what you’re going to do for me so I can do something for you.”
“We’re not killing you,” Nord said, running a finger over his lips.
“Point taken. But that’s not enough to solve this little mystery we’ve got going.”
Nord regarded him with his coal black eyes. “No. No, it ain’t.”
Fade crossed his legs and steepled his fingers. “Let’s start simple. There has to be a connection between the victims, a through line that links them all together. If we can figure out what they had in common, we might be able to work backwards and find out who our killer is.” An uncomfortable silence filled the space as Fade’s hosts waited to see who’d speak up first. Fade impatiently cleared his throat and began to stand out of his chair. “Look, if you don’t want my help, I could easily—”
“Buddy, if there was a connection,” Costello cut in, “you’d be the first to know.”
Fade massaged his eyes. “You mean to tell me that outside the whole aspect of them all being ‘criminals’, there’s nothing connecting these six victims.” The mobsters shook their heads or nodded—depending on their preference. “Nothing at all? They didn’t all graduate from Little Mobster School together, play ‘kill the coppa’ beneath the Brooklyn Bridge? Dammit,” he cursed at their blank stares. “Why can’t it ever be simple?” He ran his hand through his hair as he began to pace in one small circle, thinking aloud. “All right, fine. One thing we haven’t been posting in the paper is the fact that all the victims were killed, or at the very least, found close to their homes. That’s one thing we know for sure. So either our killer is stalking his targets or he already knows where to find them. But how could he know that? You all wouldn’t happen to have some kind of a phonebook listing you all this guy might have stolen?”
“The only way anyone could know where these boys lived is if he’s in the business or he got his hands on their records,” Pete Barry offered.
Fade stopped short and spun around. “Wait. Say that again.”
Barry furrowed his brow. “Say what?”
Fade rolled his eyes. “What you just said. About the records. Say it again. The only way…”
Barry gave his associates a hesitant glance. When no help came he sighed in resignation and acquiesced. “The only way anyone could know where these boys lived is if he’s in the business or he got his hands on their records.”
“Records. Records,” Fade repeated, rolling his hand around in a beckoning motion before it came to him. “You mean… police records?”
“Yeah,” Barry said with a shrug. “What else would I mean?”
Chapter 3
ON THE RECORD
“Explain to me—in extensive detail—why I should do anything to help you,” Stern said while he cut off the ends of his cigar, letting the flakes of tobacco fall onto Fade’s carpeting. “In fact, I think you should tell me why I bothered to trek halfway across town to be here.”
“We need to check on the victims’ police records, Captain. It’s the first lead we’ve had since… Well, ever.” Fade sat down at the edge of his desk, crossed his arms and frowned. “Besides, I thought the whole ‘to catch a killer’ idea was pretty self-explanatory. It’s been in all the papers,” he said as amiably as possible, though his patience was running thin. He hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in days and his nerves were beginning to fray.
“Mm,” Stern sounded as he lit his cigar, blowing out a large cloud of yellow-grey smoke into the air. “Speaking of which,” Stern said, fishing his jacket pocket. He pulled out a small piece of paper and carefully began unfolding it. “What was it you wrote about me in this week’s Planet, again? I forget.”
“Oh Lord,” Fade grumbled, massaging his temples. He shot an aggravated look at Din, who simply shrugged in retaliation. “I should remind you that Din’s my ghostwriter.”
“Yes, but your name is still on the by-line,” he replied, holding up the news clipping, his thumb curled around so it pointed directly at “by Foster Fade, Crime Spectacularist & Genius.” He cleared his throat. “‘Captain Stern, while perhaps working only under the purest of intentions, has done little to aid in the hunt for the Post Box Killer. His men have proven to be wholly unprepared and unequipped to face such a monster as the one currently stalking our streets. According to our sources,
officials within the New York Police Department have called for the creation of a squad solely dedicated to this sort of special crime. “Until such time,” said an officer on the condition anonymity, “I fear murderers such as the Post Box Killer will find a comfortable home within our city, and the price will be our very lives.”’ You know how much crap I got for that goddamn thing?” Stern angrily tossed the newspaper clipping at Fade, succeeding only in getting it to flutter harmlessly to the floor. He aimed an accusatory finger at Fade. “You wonder why we avoid you like the plague, it’s ’cause of crap like that. It’s bad enough the public is calling this madman a hero, you have to go and say I’m sleeping on the job.”
Fade looked to his writer. “Din…” he pleaded.
She held up her hands and shook her head. “It was Gubb’s idea, don’t forget he is the publisher, like the Almighty, his word is law. Besides it’s not my fault you boys in blue can’t get your act together,” she said to Stern before pointing to Fade, her cigarette smoldering between her fingers. “And it’s your own damn fault that you don’t read the articles before they go to print.”
“I have a ghostwriter so I don’t have to! Besides, I like reading the articles with the mugs! It’s more… exciting that way.”
“If you didn’t want me to have carte blanche,” Din shot back firmly, jutting her chin forward, “you shouldn’t have given it!”
Fade gritted his teeth. “I’m usually kind of busy.”
Din subtly raised her eyebrows as if she were trying to be impressed when there was a knock at the door. “Then get busy answering the door.”
Fade sighed in frustration before shouting over his shoulder: “Come in!”
The boy from the mailroom risked his head into the office, his face a patchwork of red, maroon and crimson. “Uh, um… Mr. Fade?”
“What!” he snapped then thought better of it. “Sorry. Yes?”
The New Adventures of Foster Fade, The Crime Spectacularist Page 2