Eight Million Ways to Die ms-5

by Lawrence Block

"I can imagine."

  "He hit arteries. You do that, you get spurting, you get blood all over the room. I never saw so much blood."

  "He must have gotten blood all over himself."

  "No way to avoid it."

  "Then how did he get out of there without anybody noticing?"

  "It was cold that night. Say he had a coat, he'd put that on over whatever else he was wearing." He drew on his cigarette. "Or maybe he wasn't wearing any clothes when he did the number on her. The hell, she was in her birthday suit, maybe he didn't want to feel overdressed. Then all he'd have to do afterward was take a shower. There was a nice beautiful bathroom there and he had all the time in the world so why not use it?"

  "Were the towels used?"

  He looked at me. The gray eyes were still unreadable, but I sensed a little more respect in his manner. "I don't remember any soiled towels," he said.

  "I don't suppose they're something you'd notice, not with a scene like that in the same room."

  "They ought to be inventoried, though." He thumbed through the file. "You know what they do, they take pictures of everything, and everything that might turn out to be evidence gets bagged and labeled and inventoried. Then it goes down to the warehouse, and when it's time to prepare a case nobody can find it." He closed the file for a moment, leaned forward. "You want to hear something? Two, three weeks ago I get a call from my sister. She and her husband live over in Brooklyn. The Midwood section. You familiar with the area?"

  "I used to be."

  "Well, it was probably nicer when you knew it. It's not so bad. I mean, the whole city's a cesspool, so it's not so bad in comparison. Why she called, they came home and found out there'd been a burglary. Somebody broke in, took a portable teevee, a typewriter, some jewelry. She called me to find out how to report it, who to call and everything. First thing I asked her is has she got insurance. No, she says, they didn't figure it was worth it. I told her to forget it. Don't report it, I told her. You'd just be wasting your time.

  "So she says how are they gonna catch the guys if she doesn't report it? So I explain how nobody's got the time to investigate a burglary anymore. You fill out a report and it goes in a file, but you don't run around looking to see who did it. Catching a burglar in the act is one thing, but investigating, hell, it's low priority, nobody's got time for it. She says okay, she can understand that, but suppose they happen to recover the goods? If she never reported the theft in the first place, how will the stuff get returned to her? And then I had to tell her just how fucked up the whole system is. We got warehouses full of stolen goods we recovered, and we got files full of reports people filled out, stuff lost to burglars, and we can't get the shit back to the rightful owners. I went on and on, I won't bore you with it, but I don't think she really wound up believing me. Because you don't want to believe it's that bad."

  He found a sheet in the file, frowned at it. He read, "One bath towel, white. One hand towel, white. Two wash cloths, white. Doesn't say used or unused." He drew out a sheaf of glossies and went rapidly through them. I looked over his shoulder at interior shots of the room where Kim Dakkinen had died. She was in some but not all of the pictures; the photographer had documented the murder scene by shooting virtually every inch of the hotel room.

  A shot of the bathroom showed a towel rack with unused linen on it.

  "No dirty towels," he said.

  "He took them along."

  "Huh?"

  "He had to wash up. Even if he just threw a topcoat over his bloody clothes. And there aren't enough towels there. There ought to be at least two of everything. A double room in a class hotel, they give you more than one bath towel and one hand towel."

  "Why would he take 'em along?"

  "Maybe to wrap the machete in."

  "He had to have a case for it in the first place, some kind of a bag to get it into the hotel. Why couldn't he take it out the same way?"

  I agreed that he could have.

  "And why wrap it in the dirty towels? Say you took a shower and dried yourself off and you wanted to wrap a machete before you put it in your suitcase. There's clean towels there. Wouldn't you wrap it in a clean one instead of sticking a wet towel in your bag?"

  "You're right."

  "It's a waste of time worrying about it," he said, tapping the photo against the top of his desk. "But I shoulda noticed the missing towels. That's something I should have thought of."

  We went through the file together. The medical report held few surprises. Death was attributed to massive hemorrhaging from multiple wounds resulting in excessive loss of blood. I guess you could call it that.

  I read through witness interrogation reports, made my way through all the other forms and scraps of paper that wind up in a homicide victim's file. I had trouble paying attention. My head was developing a dull ache and my mind was spinning its wheels. Somewhere along the way Durkin let me go through the rest of the file on my own. He lit a fresh cigarette and went back to what he'd been typing earlier.

  When I'd had as much as I could handle I closed the file and gave it back to him. He returned it to the cabinet, detouring on the way back to make a stop at the coffee machine.

  "I got 'em both with cream and sugar," he said, setting mine before me. "Maybe that's not how you like it."

  "It's fine," I said.

  "Now you know what we know," he said. I told him I appreciated it. He said, "Listen, you saved us some time and aggravation with the tip about the pimp. We owed you one. If you can turn a buck for yourself, why not?"

  "Where do you go from here?"

  He shrugged. "We proceed in normal fashion with our investigation. We run down leads and assemble evidence until such time as we have something to present to the district attorney's office."

  "That sounds like a recording."

  "Does it?"

  "What happens next, Joe?"

  "Aw, Jesus," he said. "The coffee's terrible, isn't it?"

  "It's okay."

  "I used to think it was the cups. Then one day I brought my own cup, you know, so I was drinking it out of china instead of Styrofoam. Not fancy china, just, you know, an ordinary china cup like they give you in a coffee shop. You know what I mean."

  "Sure."

  "It tasted just as bad out of a real cup. And the second day after I brought the cup I was writing out an arrest report on some scumbag and I knocked the fucking cup off the desk and broke it. You got someplace you gotta be?"

  "No."

  "Then let's go downstairs," he said. "Let's go around the corner."

  Chapter 14

  He took me around the corner and a block and a half south on Tenth Avenue to a tavern that belonged at the end of somebody's qualification. I didn't catch the name and I'm not sure if it had one. They could have called it Last Stop Before Detox. Two old men in thrift-shop suits sat together at the bar, drinking in silence. A Hispanic in his forties stood at the far end of the bar, sipping an eight-ounce glass of red wine and reading the paper. The bartender, a rawboned man in a tee shirt and jeans, was watching something on a small black and white television set. He had the volume turned way down.

  Durkin and I took a table and I went to the bar to get our drinks, a double vodka for him, ginger ale for myself. I carried them back to our table. His eyes registered my ginger ale without comment.

  It could have been a medium-strength scotch and soda. The color was about right.

  He drank some of his vodka and said, "Aw, Jesus, that helps. It really helps."

  I didn't say anything.

  "What you were asking before. Where do we go from here. Can't you answer that yourself?"

  "Probably."

  "I told my own sister to buy a new teevee and a new typewriter and hang some more locks on the door. But don't bother calling the cops. Where do we go with Dakkinen? We don't go anywhere."

  "That's what I figured."

  "We know who killed her."

  "Chance?" He nodded. "I thought his alibi looked pretty good."
<
br />   "Oh, it's gilt-edged. It's bottled in bond. So what? He still could have done it. The people he says he was with are people who would lie for him."

  "You think they were lying?"

  "No, but I wouldn't swear they weren't. Anyway, he could have hired it. We already talked about that."

  "Right."

  "If he did it he's clear. We're not going to be able to put a dent in that alibi. If he hired it we're not gonna find out who he hired. Unless we get lucky. That happens sometimes, you know. Things fall in your lap. One guy says something in a gin joint and somebody with a grudge passes it on, and all of a sudden we know something we didn't know before. But even if that happens, we'll be a long way from putting a case together. Meanwhile, we don't figure to kill ourselves over it."

  What he was saying was no surprise but there was something deadening about the words. I picked up my ginger ale and looked at it.

  He said, "Half the job is knowing the odds. Working the cases where you got a chance, letting the others flap in the breeze. You know the murder rate in this town?"

  "I know it keeps going higher."

  "Tell me about it. It's up every year. All crimes are up every year, except we're starting to get a statistical drop in some of the less serious ones because people aren't bothering to report them. Like my sister's burglary. You got mugged coming home and all that happened was he took your money? Well, shit, why make a federal case out of it, right? Be grateful you're alive. Go home and say a prayer of thanks."

  "With Kim Dakkinen-"

  "Screw Kim Dakkinen," he said. "Some dumb little bitch comes fifteen hundred miles to peddle her ass and give the money to a nigger pimp, who cares if somebody chopped her up? I mean why didn't she stay in fucking Minnesota?"

  "Wisconsin."

  "I meant Wisconsin. Most of 'em come from Minnesota."

  "I know."

  "The murder rate used to be around a thousand a year. Three a day in the five boroughs. That always seemed high."

  "High enough."

  "It's just about double that now." He leaned forward. "But that's nothing, Matt. Most homicides are husband-wife things, or two friends drinking together and one of 'em shoots the other and doesn't even remember it the next day. That rate never changes. It's the same as it always was. What's changed are stranger murders, where the killer and the victim don't know each other. That's the rate that shows you how dangerous it is to live somewhere. If you just take the stranger murders, if you throw out the other cases and put the stranger murders on a graph, the line goes up like a rocket."

  "There was a guy in Queens yesterday with a bow and arrow," I said, "and the guy next door shot him with a.38."

  "I read about that. Something about a dog shitting on the wrong lawn?"

  "Something like that."

  "Well, that wouldn't be on the chart. That's two guys who knew each other."

  "Right."

  "But it's all part of the same thing. People keep killing each other. They don't even stop and think, they just go ahead and do it. You been off the force what, a couple years now? I'll tell you this much. It's a lot worse than you remember."

  "I believe you."

  "I mean it. It's a jungle out there and all the animals are armed. Everybody's got a gun. You realize the number of people out there walking around with a piece? Your honest citizen, he's gotta have a gun now for his own protection, so he gets one and somewhere down the line he shoots himself or his wife or the guy next door."

  "The guy with the bow and arrow."

  "Whatever. But who's gonna tell him not to have a gun?" He slapped his abdomen, where his service revolver was tucked under his belt. "I gotta carry this," he said. "It's regulations. But I'll tell you, I wouldn't walk around out there without it. I'd feel naked."

  "I used to think that. You get used to it."

  "You don't carry anything?"

  "Nothing."

  "And it doesn't bother you?"

  I went to the bar and got fresh drinks, more vodka for him, more ginger ale for me. When I brought them back to the table Durkin drank the whole thing in one long swallow and sighed like a tire going flat. He cupped his hands and lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, blew out the smoke as if in a hurry to be rid of it.

  "This fucking city," he said.

  It was hopeless, he said, and he went on to tell me just how hopeless it was. He rang changes on the whole criminal justice system, from the cops to the courts to the jails, explaining how none of it worked and all of it was getting worse every day. You couldn't arrest a guy and then you couldn't convict him and finally you couldn't keep the son of a bitch in jail.

  "The prisons are overcrowded," he said, "so the judges don't want to hand out long sentences and the parole boards release people early. And the D.A.s let the guys cop to a reduced charge, they plea bargain good cases down to nothing, because the court calendars are so jammed up and the courts are so careful to protect the rights of the accused that you just about need a photo of the guy committing the crime in order to get a conviction, and then you might get a reversal because you were violating his civil rights by taking his photograph without prior permission. And in the meantime there's no cops. The department's got ten thousand men below what it had twelve years ago. Ten thousand fewer cops on the street!"

  "I know."

  "Twice as many crooks and a third less cops and you wonder why it's not safe to walk down the street. You know what it is? The city's broke. There's no money for cops, no money to keep the subways running, no money for anything. The whole country's leaking money, it's all winding up in Saudi fucking Arabia. All those assholes are trading in their camels for Cadillacs while this country goes down the fucking tubes." He stood up. "My turn to buy."

  "No, I'll get them. I'm on expenses."

  "Right, you got a client." He sat down. I came back with another round and he said, "What are you drinking there?"

  "Just ginger ale."

  "Yeah, I thought that's what it looked like. Whyntcha have a real drink?"

  "I'm sort of cutting back on it these days."

  "Oh yeah?" The gray eyes focused on me as he registered this information. He picked up his glass and drank about half of it, set it down on the worn wooden table with a thunk. "You got the right idea," he said, and I thought he meant the ginger ale, but he had shifted gears by then. "Quitting the job. Getting out. You know what I want? All I want is six more years."

  "Then you got your twenty?"

  "Then I got my twenty," he said, "and then I got my pension, and then I'm fucking well gone. Out of this job and out of this shithole of a city. Florida, Texas, New Mexico, someplace warm and dry and clean. Forget Florida, I heard things about Florida, all the fucking Cubans, they got crime like you get here. Plus they got all the dope coming in there. Those crazy Colombians. You know about the Colombians?"

  I thought of Royal Waldron. "A fellow I know says they're all right," I said. "He said you just don't want to cheat 'em."

  "You bet your ass you don't want to cheat 'em. You read about those two girls over in Long Island City? Must have been six, eight months ago. Sisters, one's twelve and one's fourteen, and they found 'em in the back room of this out-of-business gas station, hands tied behind their backs, each of 'em shot twice in the head with a small-caliber weapon, I think a.22, but who gives a shit?" He drank the rest of his drink. "Well, it didn't figure. No sex angle, nothing. It's an execution, but who executes a couple of teenage sisters?

  "Well, it clears itself up, because a week later somebody breaks into the house where they lived and shoots their mother. We found her in the kitchen with dinner still cooking on the stove. See, the family's Colombian, and the father's in the cocaine business, which is the chief industry down there outside of smuggling emeralds-"

  "I thought they grew a lot of coffee."

  "That's probably a front. Where was I? The point is, the father turns up dead a month later in whatever's the capital of Colombia. He crossed somebody and he ran for it, and they
wound up getting him in Colombia, but first they killed his kids and his wife. See, the Colombians, they play by a different set of rules. You fuck with them and they don't just kill you. They wipe out your whole family. Kids, any age, it don't matter. You got a dog and a cat and some tropical fish, they're dead too."

  "Jesus."

  "The Mafia was always considerate about family. They'd even make sure to arrange a hit so your family wouldn't be there to see it happen. Now we got criminals that kill the whole family. Nice?"

  "Jesus."

  He put his palms on the table for leverage, hoisted himself to his feet. "I'm getting this round," he announced. "I don't need some pimp payin' for my drinks."

  Back at the table he said, "He's your client, right? Chance?" When I failed to respond he said, "Well, shit, you met with him last night. He wanted to see you, and now you got a client that you won't say his name. Two and two's gotta be four, doesn't it?"

  "I can't tell you how to add it."

  "Let's just say I'm right and he's your client. For the sake of argument. You won't be givin' nothin' away."

  "All right."

  He leaned forward. "He killed her," he said. "So why would he hire you to investigate it?"

  "Maybe he didn't kill her."

  "Oh, sure he did." He dismissed the possibility of Chance's innocence with a wave of his hand. "She says she's quitting him and he says okay and the next day she's dead. Come on, Matt. What's that if it's not cut and dried?"

  "Then we get back to your question. Why'd he hire me?"

  "Maybe to take the heat off."

  "How?"

  "Maybe he'll figure we'll figure he must be innocent or he wouldn't have hired you."

  "But that's not what you figured at all."

  "No."

  "You think he'd really think that?"

  "How do I know what some coked-up spade pimp is gonna think?"

  "You figure he's a cokehead?"

  "He's got to spend it on something, doesn't he? It's not gonna go for country-club dues and a box at the charity ball. Lemme ask you something."

  "Go ahead."

  "You think there's a chance in the world he didn't kill her? Or set her up and hire it done?"