Alone with the Dead

by Robert J. Randisi

  He had to give Swann one thing, though. The man was a damned good clerical-and he knew how to make this goddamned Xerox machine work.

  Slovecky had been trying to Xerox the same piece of paper for the past five minutes, and he couldn't even get the damned machine to go on. Suddenly, he noticed that the doors in front of the machine were ajar. Shit, he hadn't even known that there were doors there.

  He crouched down to try to close them and then opened them in order to see how they secured. He found himself looking at the inner workings of the machine, which included a big drumlike thing. He frowned then, because he saw a flash of white on the drum. He tried to reach in to get it but couldn't. There was a handle in his face and it turned out to be connected to the drum. He grasped it, pulled up, then pushed down and slid the drum out, where he could get at it. Sure enough, there was a piece of paper on it, a copy that someone had made and left in there. Whoever it was had probably not even realized it. He slid the paper off the drum and pushed the thing back in, where it locked into place. Next he closed the doors and locked them into place. All of that done, he was able to make his copy, which he did, and then he shut the machine off.

  As he reached for the lamp on Swann's desk, he realized he was still holding the piece of paper he'd taken from the belly of the machine. He glanced at it, and then his eyes widened. He smoothed it out and took a good look at it under the light.

  "Fuck," he said.

  Somebody was making copies of the note from the Lover. All the copies should have been made earlier in the day, and they were accounted for. And he knew that the machine had been used since then. That meant that, just before closing up shop, somebody had made an extra copy of the noteand this one had gotten stuck in the machine.

  Swann, he thought. That clerical fuck was the only one who really knew how to work the machine. Now why the fuck was he making a copy of the note… and what else had he been making copies of all along?

  He went to Swann's desk and began going through his drawers. If he was hoping to find a duplicate file there, he was disappointeduntil he really dug down to the bottom of the drawer. There was a piece of paper lying flat on the bottom, underneath the hanging files. He pulled it out and saw that it was another page of the report.

  One page in the belly of the Xerox machine could be anything, but another page in Swann's drawer clinched it. The man was making copies, but why?

  ***

  Swann watched Keough read for a short time, until it made Keough nervous. At that point, he asked the man for another beer, and Swann went to the kitchen to get it.

  "Why don't you check on your wife and kids, too?" Keough asked.

  "I'm making you nervous, right?"

  "You got it."

  "Listen," Swann said, "you've still got a lot of paperwork to go through. I'm gonna go and take a shower."

  "Now that's a good idea." Keough hadn't wanted to tell Swann, but the man's constant perspiring in the small room had created an odor that was both pungent and unpleasant.

  "I'll be back in a little while."

  "Fine."

  "You want that beer before I go?"

  "Just bring it with you when you come back."

  "Okay."

  "And leave the door open, will…" Keough started to say, but he was too late. Swann had left the room and closed the door behind him. From his seat behind Swann's desk, Keough was able to reach over and crack the door open enough to let some air in-and some of Swann's odor out. That done, he turned back to the papers.

  He had to hand it to Swann. The man had amassed every fact about the so-called Lover murders, and that included the Brooklyn cases.

  ***

  By the time Swann returned, Keough was excited by what he'd read.

  "Jesus, Len," he said as the man entered the room, "there are more discrepancies than I thought."

  "You saw the thing about the thorns, huh?"

  "Damn right I did."

  As it turned out, the roses in the Manhattan cases had clean stems, while the two roses inserted into the vaginas of the Brooklyn girls had thorns on the stems.

  "So even though the second rose was red, like the others, it was still different."

  Swann nodded and stood behind Keough. The man smelled much better now that he was fresh from a shower. Keough, however, had begun to sweat… and smell.

  "Jesus," Keough said, "imagine this sick fuck stuffing the roses, thorns and all, into these girls?"

  "Did you see the thing about the rapes?"

  "What about them?"

  "Look." Swann leaned over him and started leafing through the pages. "Where is it, I know it's here… yeah, here. Read this."

  Keough leaned forward and read what was on the sheet with growing annoyance, until he exploded. He sat back and glared at Swann in disbelief.

  "You mean Slovecky is sitting on this, too?"

  "Slovecky says a rose is a rose."

  "But…" Keough leaned forward and pointed "… it says right here the Brooklyn girls weren't raped? Wait a minute-I asked Carcaterra if they were sexually molested and he said yes."

  "What would you call inserting the stem of a rose, thorns and all, into a girl's vagina?"

  "Wait a minute," Keough said again. He looked around, starting to feel cramped in the small office. "Can we go into the living room?"

  "Sure," Swann said. "Everyone else is in bed. Come on."

  They left the claustrophobic office and went into the living room, where Keough sat on the sofa and set the paperwork down on the coffee table.

  "Let me get you that other beer," Swann said.

  "Good. I could use it."

  Swann went into the kitchen and came back with two more beers. He'd changed his clothes earlier, and was now wearing a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt that said BROOKLYN BREWERY on it.

  "Let's go over the differences between the Manhattan and Brooklyn cases," Keough said, after taking a swig of beer.

  "Okay," Swann said. He ticked them off on his fingers. "We have a different color rose, we have the thorns still on the stems, and we have the fact that the killer did not rape the girls."

  "And they're sure of that part?"

  "There was no semen."

  "What about condoms? Could he have used them?"

  Swann shook his head. "There would be trace evidence of the rubber, or the lubricant, and there was none."

  "Okay," Keough added, "there's also the age difference. The Brooklyn girls were in high school, while the Manhattan girls are college age."

  "Right."

  "Four," Keough said, "four discrepancies, Swannie. That's too much to ignore."

  "Apparently," Swan said, "not for Slovecky."

  "What about the other detectives in the squad? What about the second whip, Dolan?"

  "Come on, Joe," Swann said. "It's Slovecky's squad; he calls the shots. They don't want to rock the boat. After all, it's a temporary assignment for everyone."

  "Jesus," Keough said, exasperated. "Then we have to go to the chief with this stuff, like we talked about."

  "I don't know."

  "We have to go to someone, Swannie, because your CO and mine don't want to hear about it."

  Swan thought it over for a few moments, working on the bottle of beer, and then looked at Keough.

  "Okay, let's do it."

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Rather than go back to his empty apartment, Dan Slovecky decided to stop at a bar on the way home. Since the divorce, he had been living in the same basement apartment in the East Village, and the bar he chose was one that was near home, rather than any of the cop bars he knew of in the city. Slovecky didn't drink in cop bars, and he didn't hang out with cops. He was, after all, a lieutenant, a boss. It wouldn't do for him to rub elbows with the regular cops and detectives. He'd lose their respect, that way.

  Slovecky, because of his size, was used to commanding respect, but he deluded himself by thinking it was because of his rank. Rather, he instilled fear in most men due to his size and
his temper.

  He lived in the Village because it was fairly inexpensive for him. He was, in fact, subletting a cheap apartment, which made it cheaper still for him. Under normal circumstances, he would never have chosen this neighborhood to live in. It was filled with homosexuals, and like most brutal men, he had a distrust and disgust of "fags." He found them a threat to his manhood, something he would never have admitted to anyone-least of all to himself.

  A psychiatrist might have said that he subconsciously chose to live there, looking to feed a rage that was far from starved.

  Like everything else in his life, though, Slovecky felt that he was stuck there. For a while, he felt that way about his job, felt he'd be stuck at lieutenant for good. That was when he decided to start using some of the information he'd been storing up for years. Dirt stuck to Slovecky's fingers, and sometimes it was other people's dirt, like Inspector Pollard's affair with a black junkie. He was able to take that little piece of information and use it to wrangle himself the job as whip on the Lover Task Force. From there, he expected to ultimately ride the task force job to deputy inspector.

  It was 8:00 P.M. when he stopped in a bar called the Peculiar Pub, on Bleecker, west of La Guardia. It was a good walk from his apartment, an NYU hangout he knew didn't cater to gays, and he wanted to do some thinking without having some fag checking him out. Like most macho homophobes, he thought all gays were looking to hit on him.

  He seated himself at the bar and nodded to the bartender, who might or might not have recognized him from other times he'd been there but who nodded back just the same.

  "Draft," he said, and then cradled the mug the bartender put in front of him.

  He scowled as he thought again about Len Swann making copies of reports. The task force was his ticket to better things, position, a nicer place to live, and he wasn't going to let some clerk mess it up for him. He remembered now how Swann wanted to argue about the Brooklyn murders not being Lover killings. What if Swann started asking more questions? What was wrong with the guy, anyway? Jesus, there were roses, weren't there? Naming a second killer would really start a panic, wouldn't it? Didn't it make sense to lump all the killings together and blame them on the Lover? That way, when the case was closed, people would feel safe, and Slovecky would look even better for a promotion.

  All of that could be in danger now because of Swann. Slovecky had to find out why Swann was making copies of all the reports and whom he might have shown them to. After that, he was going to have to make sure that Swann didn't have a chance to show them to anyone else.

  Over another beer, he decided the best thing to do was go out to Brooklyn and brace Swann at his house. He was going to have to take a cab, though, or the subway. He didn't own a car-his ex-wife had walked away with it-and he couldn't afford to use a task force unit.

  He had a couple of more beers-with added shots of whiskey for fortification-and then left the Peculiar and walked unsteadily to the nearest subway stop.

  It was 9:00 P.M.

  ***

  "Okay," Len Swann said, "here it is."

  He handed the report to Keough to read and sat back in his chair, rubbing his eyes. They were back in his little office again, and he'd just finished typing a two-page memolike report to the chief of detectives about the murders in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

  Keough read it carefully, and when he was done, he had to admit that Swann really was good at this paperwork stuff. He'd never have been able to put it down on paper so simply and concisely.

  "This is it," Keough said. "This is perfect; it says everything."

  "You know," Swann said, "Slovecky's not going to like this when it comes out."

  "Neither is the chief," Keough said, "or the commissioner. I think Slovecky's whip days are going to be over."

  A sour look came over Swann's face.

  "Len, are you afraid of Slovecky?"

  "Well, no… yeah, I guess I am, but besides that… he's a cop."

  "He's a boss," Keough said. "There's a difference, you know."

  "Still, we're going over his head."

  "Have you talked to him about this?"

  Swann hesitated, then said, "I tried when the cases came in, but he was adamant. He insists that the rose is the overriding factor that links the cases."

  "And he ignores everything," Keough said. "I said it before, Swannie, and I'll say it again. He's willing to let a killer go free to make himself look good. I think that's wrong."

  "I know, I know," Swann said. "I agree with you."

  "Well, we can't let him get away with it," Keough said, brandishing the report.

  "How about I talk to Sergeant Dolan again?"

  "Your second whip?"

  Swann nodded. "Maybe I can get him to go along with us on this."

  "And then what?"

  "And then… I don't know," Swann said helplessly. "Maybe he can talk some sense into Slovecky."

  "Is he intimidated by Slovecky?"

  "Well… yeah, I think. I mean, he expressed his own opinion about the note…"

  "But nothing came of it, right? Slovecky shot him down?"

  Swann lowered his head and said, "Yeah."

  "I think we should send this." Keough put the report down on the desk in front of Swann. "I'm going to leave it with you, though. You do what you think you've got to do. You talk to Dolan, or send the report, or do it in whatever order you feel good with-but send it, okay?"

  Swann nodded. "Okay."

  "And let me know when you do."

  Swann nodded.

  Keough looked at his watch. It was almost ten o'clock.

  "It's late, Swannie. I'm going to head home."

  "Okay." Swann stood up. "I'll walk you to the door."

  At the front door, Keough turned and shook hands with Swann.

  "We're doing the right thing, you know."

  "I know," Swann said uncertainly, "I know."

  ***

  As Keough walked to his car and Swann watched him, neither of them was aware of the man standing across the street in the shadows, watching them. Keough got in his car, started it up, and drove away. Swann closed the door and turned off the outside light.

  The man in the shadows started across the street.

  ***

  Marcia Swann woke up, rolled over, and looked at the red glowing numerals on the bedside clock radio. It was 2:15 A.M. and her husband hadn't come to bed yet. She doubted very much that Joe Keough was still downstairs with him, but she rose and paused to put on a robe just the same. Sufficiently covered, she went downstairs to find her husband.

  When she got downstairs, the lights were still on in the living room, but her husband wasn't there, not even in the recliner he often fell asleep in. She decided to check the kitchen next. Sometimes when Len Swann couldn't sleep, he sat in the kitchen with a cup of tea. Usually, she'd find the cup still on the table, half-filled with cold tea. She never understood what the point was for her husband to make tea, then not drink it.

  The kitchen was dark, and there was no teacup on the table when she turned on the light. She saw several empty beer bottles in the garbage, though. Maybe Keough had left and Swann had fallen asleep at his desk. He didn't do it often, but he had done it once or twice.

  She went to the door of the small office and saw the light from beneath it. She knocked once, and when there was no answer, she opened it and entered.

  "Len?" she called. "Honey, are you asleep?"

  He was seated in his chair, his back to her. His head was cocked to one side, and she felt sure he was asleep. She moved alongside him, at the same time putting her hand on the back of the chair and turning it toward her.

  "Honey," she started to say, "time to wake up and go to sl…"

  She stopped short and caught her breath when she saw that her husband was not asleep. He looked asleep, with his eyes closed and his head lolling to one side the way it did when he complained of a stiff neck from falling asleep that way in his recliner. He could have been asleep, if it was
n't for the handle of the little sword he used as a letter opener. It was protruding from his chest, and blood had dripped down the front of his shirt and pooled up in his lap.

  As a cop's wife, she was always prepared for the worst, for a policeman appearing at her door to tell her that her husband was injured, or worse, dead. She was not, however, prepared to find her husband dead herself, in their own home, and she did what any other woman would do, cop's wife or not: She screamed.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  When Keough arrived at the Swann home at 5:15 A.M., there were a number of vehicles parked out front, including the medical examiner's wagon. It was just starting to get light out, and the heat was creeping in.

  "Stand back, bud," a uniformed cop said to him, holding his arm in front of him to block his way.

  "I'm on the job." Keough showed the man his shield.

  The cop studied him and said, "I don't recognize you from the squad."

  "I'm not with your precinct," he said. "I'm with the Six-Seven Squad. I was called in."

  "By who?"

  "The wife. The dead man was a friend of mine."

  The cop, fresh-faced and young-looking, wasn't sure what to do.

  "If you ain't with the squad, I don't know if I can"

  Keough, still in shock from the call he'd received from Marcia Swann, brushed past the cop and said, "Take it up with the duty captain, pal," and walked to the house. The young cop did not try to stop him.

  Keough got to the door, which was open, and had to show his shield to another cop. This time, he hung it from the pocket of his jacket.

  "You ain't with the squad," this cop said. He was older than the other, and his demeanor was more relaxed.