Hunting the Five Point Killer

by C. M. Wendelboe

  “Someone doesn’t want me—or Ana Maria—looking into those deaths. Someone sent us both a message last night—”

  “Some message.” Johnny pointed to Arn’s jeans bulging at the leg from the wraps, and at the butterfly bandages on his ear and cheek.

  “This guy last night could have killed us both. He didn’t. He wanted to warn us off the case.”

  Johnny’s face grew serious, his eyebrows coming together in a pronounced frown. “What it tells me is someone’s toying with you. I can’t offer any protection. But I can offer advice: if this guy is good enough to make you look like a fool twice now, he’s good enough to finish the job any time the notion strikes him. If he’s more than just toying with you.”

  He started out the door when Arn called after him. “I need those files on Gaylord and Steve. And the Five Point cases. I’ve already had the mayor’s office grease the wheels with the city legal advisor.”

  Johnny paused, turned around, and kicked the door shut with his boot. The veins in his neck throbbed, and spittle flew from his mouth. “I don’t appreciate being held hostage in my own office—”

  “You don’t want me finding Butch’s killer?”

  “What the hell kind of question is that?”

  “The way you’re keeping me out of the loop makes me wonder. I shouldn’t have had to go to the mayor. You can expect a call from his office any time,” Arn lied. He had called the mayor, who told him he couldn’t force the police chief to release official reports. In time, Arn told himself, he’d tell Johnny the truth. But not today.

  Johnny sat on the edge of his desk. He closed his eyes and pinched his nose together. “What do you need?”

  “Everything. Incident reports, interviews, photos. Any follow-up reports that were filed over the years.”

  Johnny picked up the phone, and Arn wasn’t sure if he was calling a uniform to toss him out or not. But Johnny asked for the city attorney, and they spoke for a moment before Johnny hung up the phone. “Gorilla Legs will have everything copied in a couple hours. But don’t ever push me like this again or I’ll haul you into the mayor’s office personally and demand you be canned. He’s got just enough pull with the TV station he can make it happen.”

  “Fair enough,” Arn said.

  “You get what we have with one caveat: you keep this office informed as to what you learn. If anything.”

  Arn nodded. He thought he’d start by telling Johnny that Oblanski was the one dancing with Hannah the night Butch was murdered, the one who’d given her a ride home. It wasn’t so much that he mistrusted Johnny; he just didn’t want it getting back to Oblanski. And Arn wanted to confront him in person. He needed to gauge Oblanski’s reaction for himself. His life and Ana Maria’s life might depend on it.

  Twenty-Two

  Arn closed the canvas drop cloth he’d stapled over the doorway leading to what had once been his mother’s sewing room. He wrestled a piece of plywood on top of two sawhorses and broomed dust off it. When he finished, he moved the makeshift table close to the new drywall Danny had hung yesterday. He separated Gaylord and Steve and Butch’s incident reports in order of occurrence, and then set aside photos taken of all three deaths. He grabbed a box of push pins and began tacking photos on the wall.

  “I hope you know you’re the one going to fill in those pin holes before I paint,” Danny said.

  Arn spun around and did the best he could to hide the pictures. “You can’t see these!”

  “Already have. I accidentally knocked them over when I was spackling in here earlier. They’re pretty gruesome.”

  “Leave.”

  “And miss out helping you solve these cases?”

  “I don’t need help,” Arn said.

  Danny smiled and sat on a chair missing the back. “Like the Lone Ranger didn’t need Tonto? Or Hopalong Cassidy didn’t need Gabby Hayes? You need me. We got some time before dinner’s ready, so let’s see what we got.”

  Arn started to argue, then gave up. “What the hell,” he said. He finished pinning photos. “No one would believe I shared this with … ”

  “A formerly homeless man.”

  “Something like that.”

  When Arn had pinned the pictures on the wall, he wrote in pencil each officer’s name on the drywall above and returned to the reports.

  Danny stood to look at the photos from a different angle. “Aha.” He pointed to a series of photos. “I told you Detective Fournier slapped his monkey to death,” he said almost gleefully

  Gaylord Fournier hung naked from his basement rafters by a flimsy cotton rope. Hustler and Playboy magazines were strewn about in front where he could get a good look as he masturbated. A full-length mirror reflected his body back at the camera.

  “I just don’t understand how he could have died.” Danny ran his finger over Gaylord’s hands, which hung beside his bare legs. “Looks like he could reach up and save himself.”

  “That’s if he realized he needed saving,” Arn said. He laid out the police reports. “Most men—and just men seem to be involved in this—put a ligature around their neck that applies pressure to the carotid as they masturbate. At just the precise moment when they’re about to lose consciousness, they pull the ligature and release the rope. Their safety knot.”

  “Some safety knot,” Danny said. “Why didn’t Gaylord use it?”

  “Who knows? Maybe he didn’t realize he was that close to losing consciousness. Maybe his safety knot got sweaty and didn’t allow the rope to slip free.”

  Danny wiped his hands on his jeans like he’d actually touched Gaylord’s dead body.

  “I saw that happen before,” Arn continued. “There’s only about a ten-second window between pulling the safety knot and saving yourself, or ending up like Gaylord.”

  Danny grabbed a follow-up report from Gaylord’s pile and moved the lamp closer. “It looks like Butch Spangler was the investigating officer.”

  “He was the primary. Bobby Madden assisted.”

  Danny turned the page. “Butch believed Gaylord had been doing this for some time.”

  Arn took Butch’s report. He’d interviewed Adelle Fournier, who was out shopping at the time. Butch quoted her as saying Gaylord had his own little man cave in the basement that she never ventured into. “Too many filthy magazines,” she said. “Too embarrassing.”

  Arn laid the report down and approached the photos. He donned his reading glasses and turned the floor lamp to illuminate them better.

  “Find something?” Danny asked.

  Arn held up his hand. He needed quiet to think, before the thought vanished as easily as the drywall dust had settled.

  He bent to the reports and shuffled through them until he came up with Gaylord’s autopsy report. “‘Everything was consistent with accidental hanging in the commission of an erotic event,’ the coroner ruled,” Arn said. “The medical examiner noted that the rope ‘had cut through the outer dermis as a result of hanging.’”

  “I’d think you’d expect that with a rope,” Danny said.

  “Adelle said her husband must have been doing the wild thing with himself for some time. But … ” Arn ran his fingers over Gaylord’s bulging neck encircled by the rope. “Men who do this never—and I repeat, never—use just a rope. That would result in just what the ME noted: cutting into the neck. These people always use something between … ” He looked around frantically and grabbed a shop rag from the chair. He rolled it up around a length of twine he’d snatched from the floor. “Between their neck and the rope: a towel or a pillow. Something so they can go to their work and function. The last thing they want to do is draw attention from people noticing rope marks on their necks.”

  “I still don’t understand why you got your panties in a wad,” Danny said. “If the ME said it was accidental … ”

  “He might have been wrong. Like Butch may have
been wrong.”

  “So you think someone did the hanging for ol’ Gaylord?” Danny laughed.

  “I need to get into his old house.”

  “For what?” Danny asked.

  Arn hefted the piece of rolled-up rag. “I need to get a look at where his little self-love nest was.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “Find out who bought the place and ask them. It’s not rocket science.”

  “Neither is it rocket science that Steve DeBoer’s death was ‘unquestionably accidental,’” Danny said, reading aloud from another report. “Passed out in his own home with a cigarette between his fingers.”

  Arn sat across from Danny and picked up the fire marshal’s report. Steve DeBoer had passed out in his recliner with a cigarette in his hand that ultimately set the curtains on fire. “Accidental,” Arn breathed. “Smoke inhalation killed him.”

  “Good,” Danny said. “Then we can scratch one death off as an accident.”

  “Not quite yet,” Arn said. He put on his reading glasses again and stared at the picture of a semi-blackened Steve DeBoer, recliner parked under heavy curtains that were little more than burnt shards. “There’s something odd about that scene … I need to talk to Pieter. He said he spent some time with Gaylord and Steve. If anyone knows more about them, he should.”

  The timer went off and Danny stood. “How about you check with him after we eat.”

  Twenty-Three

  Danny slipped a hand inside an oven mitt and took dinner out of the toaster oven. He set the casserole plate on top of a trivet on the makeshift counter and turned to paper plates stacked neatly on one end. The tuna casserole smelled good, especially since Arn had only eaten on the run today, in more ways than he liked. He’d slipped through the drive-through at Dr. Zhivago’s Russian and Mexican Exotic Grill, and the vodka chili burrito had given him Montezuma’s Revenge. He prayed it was out of his system.

  “Where’d we get the card table?”

  “Dining table.”

  “Okay,” Arn said, “where’d we get the dining table?”

  “Same place we got the toaster oven.” Danny nodded to the front door. “In the dumpster.”

  “If you’re going to lie,” Arn said, flipping the receipt taped to the bottom of the toaster box, “you’re going to have to do better than that.” He leaned over the casserole dish, but Danny shooed him away. “Where’d you get the money?”

  “I had to go begging, ’cause some tightwad won’t spring for appliances for the place.”

  “I don’t see why we couldn’t just keep eating out.”

  Danny laid the oven mitt inside a milk crate atop kitchen towels. He stood with his hands on his hips, just like Arn’s mother used to do when she was preparing to scold him. Or educate him. “We need to get some nutritious food into us. We can only eat so much McDonald’s and Taco John’s and … what’s that place that’s always giving you the Hershey squirts?”

  “Dr. Zhivago’s Russian and Mexican Exotic Grill,” Arn groaned.

  “That’s the place. Waiters dress like Cossacks in sombreros.” Danny unfolded another chair he’d acquired someplace. “We got to start eating healthy. Besides, with company coming over we needed something besides milk crates to eat on.”

  “Company? Danny, we don’t even have a running toilet in here.”

  “I replumbed the bathroom today.” Danny beamed. “So we won’t have to keep using that smelly, barbaric thing you picked up at the camping store. And the shower surround will be delivered tomorrow, so we won’t have to go to the Rec Center.”

  “What makes you think you’ll be around long enough to use the shower?” Arn asked.

  Danny waved his arm around the room. “You think this place is going to get finished anytime soon? I’m here until the last of the paint dries. That was our deal.”

  That had been their deal, Arn told himself, and he was glad they’d made it, too. In the four days since Danny had started renovating the old house, he’d torn out the moldy plaster and lath, with Lowe’s delivering more drywall tomorrow. He’d pulled half the wire in the house and planned to finish that and install a new breaker box by the weekend. A working toilet and shower would be welcome, and the furnace people were scheduled to install a new unit tomorrow afternoon after city inspectors checked Danny’s wiring. Arn could pick up an Army cot at surplus, and the four-hundred-a-week that went into the roach trap he was staying in would go toward materials for the house.

  “If you’re that far along, I might just move in to my old room after the furnace is installed.”

  “Your old room over the carriage garage?”

  “Is it ready?” Arn asked. “’Cause it beats sleeping in the hallway.”

  “I haven’t hung a new door yet, but the drywall’s up.”

  Arn had grown up in the room just above where his great grand­father, and later his grandfather in a moment of nostalgia, had pulled their buggies to unload. As a kid, he would lie back on his wafer-thin mattress, close his eyes, and file the faint odor of horse dung that lingered into his imagination. Bad guys came and went, chased by sheriffs in white hats, inside Arn’s imagination back then. What happened back in buggy days underneath his boyhood room offered an escape from the painful abuse from his father, and his thoughts returned to Pieter. Like Pieter’s father, Arn’s father had been a city policeman. And also like Butch, Arn’s father had been abusive, though in other ways.

  “You never said who’s coming to dinner,” he said to Danny.

  “Ana Maria,” Danny answered. “I told her the least I could do for her giving me a ride home last night was invite her over.”

  “All right, but make sure the generator’s running. I’m getting tired of working with no city electricity. We need some amenities. Like a TV.”

  “Crap!” Danny snapped his finger. “They’re re-airing Chief White’s segment in three minutes.”

  “So you have a TV? Where’d you get it?”

  “Dumpster.” Danny started down the hallway devoid of plaster on the wall studs, bare lath sticking out in places, dangling wires taped off, and passed through the door into what had once been the living room. A thirteen-inch television sat on a plank spanning two concrete blocks.

  “I don’t recall getting the cable hooked up yet.”

  “You didn’t,” Danny answered, plopping into his bean bag chair.

  “Then where … ?”

  “Two houses down.” Danny leaned over and adjusted the volume. “They came home long enough to grab fresh clothes, then took off again.”

  “You can’t tap into their cable,” Arn said.

  “Sure I can.” Danny held his finger to his lips as the camera panned from Ana Maria to Johnny standing nervously on the Police Department steps. His eyes darted between Ana Maria and the camera. His blue tie contrasted with his starched white shirt in the glare of the floodlights.

  “I understand there have been new developments in the Butch Spangler murder investigation,” Ana Maria said, thrusting the microphone at Johnny.

  “I thought you weren’t getting anywhere with Butch’s murder?” Danny said.

  “We’re not. Johnny must have uncovered something he’s not sharing with us.”

  “Even if he didn’t learn something new, the killer—if he’s still around—will think so.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Arn said.

  Ana Maria asked Johnny about the Five Point killings. He looked around like he was planning his escape route, nervously switching his weight between feet. Johnny wanted to be anywhere other than talking on television about the Five Point cases. “There’s never been any connection between Butch Spangler, Gaylord Fournier, or Steve DeBoer and those murders,” he said.

  “But all three officers died around the same time. And all three men were working those cases.”

 
Johnny looked directly into the camera. “Mere coincidence.”

  A knock on the door made both of them jump, and Arn reached for his ankle rig that wasn’t there. He promised himself he’d go gun shopping tomorrow. Right now, Ana Maria might need the gun more than he.

  He hobbled to the door and grabbed a claw hammer from beside a box of drywall nails. He peeked through the hole, careful to keep to one side of the door. Ana Maria stood on the porch cradling a bottle of wine and stomping circulation into her feet. Arn dropped the hammer on the floor and opened the door. She walked in and surveyed the improvements to the house. “You’ve done quite a bit since I was here last.”

  “Make that Danny’s done quite a bit.”

  “Maybe you ought to marry him.” Ana Maria drew in a long breath. “Especially by the smell of dinner,” she said as Arn led her into the kitchen.

  “Your episode looked good tonight,” Danny said. He’d turned off the TV and stood at the doorway waiting for her like a maître’d. He took the bottle of wine and held the label to the light. “A Chardonnay from one of the Mendocino wineries. Excellent choice to go with tuna casserole.”

  He opened his pocket knife and withdrew a corkscrew, which he worked into the cork. It popped coming out, and the bouquet was pleasant and sweet wafting past Arn’s nose. Danny grabbed red SOLO cups and poured Arn and Ana Maria three fingers. He noticed Ana Maria eying the cups. “Best we can do until someone”—he exaggerated a look at Arn—“springs for some regular glasses.”

  “You’re not having any wine?” Ana Maria asked when she saw Danny replacing the cork. “You sounded like you’re knowledgeable.”

  Danny smiled and took off the foil covering the casserole dish. “That was my trouble: I was too much a wine expert back in the day.” He laughed. “And it wasn’t this fancy kind, either.” He dished them each a serving and joined them at the card table.

  “Are you feeling okay?” Arn asked Ana Maria.

  She picked at her casserole with her fork. “DeAngelo threatened to take me off the television special and pass it to someone else.” She swirled the wine around in the cup. She sipped lightly and set it down. “He said high ratings weren’t worth me getting hurt.”