Primary Justice

by William Bernhardt

  Mona, he discovered to his dismay, was from the full-body, free-spirit school that perceived dancing as a tribal rite of foreplay. She wriggled, she squirmed, she heaved. When they were close, Ben heard strange guttural noises emanating from between her teeth. And stealing occasional furtive glances over her shoulder, Ben saw that many eyes in the ballroom were understandably fixed upon Mona. And, by association, Ben.

  And then, just when Ben thought he had reached the apex of embarrassment, matters got worse. The band finished the Springsteen and began another song. A slow dance.

  “Well, thanks,” Ben said, edging away. “I enjoyed the dance.”

  Mona seized his hand. “You’re not slipping away yet, my sweet young thing. Come cuddle with Mona.”

  Ben felt his face burning. He was finished. He knew it. Might as well get the résumés back in the mail. He extended his arms to hold her in the traditional waltz posture, but she insisted upon the full-body press more popular in junior high schools. Blissfully, the lights dimmed.

  Ben tried to keep in step with the music, but he found Mona was more interested in groping than dancing. He felt her hot breath in his ear.

  “Let’s do something crazy,” she whispered, breathing hard.

  “Like what?” he responded, wishing he hadn’t.

  “Don’t play games with me, Kincaid. You’ve been teasing me all night long. You don’t give a girl a chance, do you?” She leaned forward and nibbled on his ear.

  “Stop that!” Ben said. He looked around quickly to see if anybody was watching. “You could get me fired.”

  “You could get me fired up.” She blew into his ear.

  “Please!” Ben pleaded. “You’re the senior partner’s wife. If anyone found out—”

  “So don’t tell anyone. I think boys who kiss and tell are naughty.” She licked her lips suggestively. “I’m ready to go.”

  “I can’t afford to lose my job the first week—”

  “Well, that’s just what will happen, Benjy, if you don’t meet me in the hallway outside the ballroom in two minutes.” Her voice had a new edge to it. “Don’t forget, I talk with the boss on a regular basis. I can have you out of this firm in a heartbeat.” She stroked him under his chin and smiled. “And I’d hate to see that happen. Such a waste. So meet me in two minutes.”

  Ben sputtered, “But what will I tell everyone?”

  “Tell them you’re going out for fresh air.”

  “Where will we go?”

  Mona released him and stepped back. “Come on, Benjy, this is a hotel, after all. And bring me a glass of champagne.” She lifted the hem of her gown and ran quickly off the dance floor. Ben walked slowly in another direction, doing his best to look as if he had come with someone else.

  Ben paced back and forth in the hallway with a glass of champagne in each hand. It had been five minutes. If she didn’t show up soon, he’d just leave and claim he thought he’d been stood up. But what if she told some lie about him to Raven? No, he needed to talk with her, to make her see the error of her ways. He was certain he could reason with her as one logical human being to another. He didn’t have anything personal against her; it was just an impossible proposition.

  He heard a commotion at the other end of the hallway, by the escalators that led to the hotel lobby one floor up. Louise Derek was standing at the base of the up escalator, facing her husband, who was riding up. They were arguing with one another, in loud, strident voices.

  “I’ve never even seen your goddamn cough drops!” Louise shrieked. For a petite woman, she could muster an extremely powerful voice.

  “Sure,” Derek said, not even deigning to look at her. “Right. Then where are they?”

  “How the hell should I know? Maybe you left them at your girlfriend’s place.”

  Derek stepped off the up escalator and stepped onto the down. “Don’t start that again. Every time you get upset about something you fail back on—”

  “Don’t tell me what to start up! I’ll start it up if I want to. You’re a walking viral infection! God knows what you’ve brought home to my bed!”

  “Louise, that’s all in the past.”

  “Sure, that’s your story. How the hell would I know?” Her face was becoming red and blotchy. “It’s not as if you’re ever home!”

  Derek sighed, stepped off the down escalator, brushed past her, and rode back up again. “I work very hard—”

  “At certain things, yes.”

  Derek began to get angry. “Look, I do it for you. You and the kids.”

  Louise laughed bitterly. “The hell you do. Look, Dick, if you’re doing it for me—don’t. I’d rather have a husband than a super-stud lawyer.” She laughed again. “The only person in your whole life you’ve ever done anything for is yourself. You’re the most goddamn selfish man ever!” Tears were beginning to stream from her eyes.

  Derek started back down again on the other escalator. “You’re not being fair.”

  “Who says I have to be fair? God knows you’ve never been fair, you egotistical son-of-a-bitch!” Derek stepped off the escalator and moved toward her. “And you keep your fucking hands off!” She wrapped her arms around herself and walked away.

  Derek sighed, got back on the escalator, and rode all the way up. He strode into the lobby and disappeared.

  Louise began walking toward Ben. Her face looked as if it had aged five years in five minutes.

  Ben decided this would be an opportune moment to make himself scarce.

  He turned left down a narrow hallway opposite the north side of the ballroom. Almost immediately, a door on the left opened and a familiar hand with long black fingernails reached out to him.

  “Pssst. In here.” The hand gripped Ben’s wrist and gave him a tug. Champagne spilled on Ben’s tuxedo. The hand pulled him into a tiny dark room.

  “What is this?” Ben asked.

  “Janitorial closet,” she whispered. She took the champagne glasses away and yanked off his jacket.

  “But I thought—”

  “This is better,” she said. “More intimate. More dangerous.” She started untying his bow tie.

  “Right,” Ben muttered. “Just what I was hoping for. More danger. Ow!” He banged his head on an overhead shelf. Shifting positions, he managed to rest himself against a dusty shelf loaded with cleaning fluids. “Not much room in here.”

  “That’s right, Benjy, nowhere to go but into Mona. Come to Mama.”

  Ben reached out into the darkness to stop whatever overture she was making, but his hand alighted on soft warm flesh that could be nothing other than a woman’s breast. With a sudden frisson of horror, Ben realized that she was not wearing any clothing.

  Ben began to feel queasy. “Look, Mrs. Raven, let’s examine this rationally—”

  “Examine this, you tease.” She bit down on his earlobe and pressed her hot naked body against his. “First you lure a girl into the janitor’s closet, then you play hard to get. You sexual sadist! Stop talking and get on with it.”

  Ben felt a skilled hand systematically eliminating the pearl-studded buttons on his shirt. She was out of control, an unstoppable, elemental force of nature. He prayed that no one in the hotel got a sudden urge to do some dusting.

  10

  BEN WAS AWAKENED THE next morning by the harsh sound of a ringing telephone. He gave it six chances to relent, but the fiend demanded to be answered. Groaning, Ben crawled out of the sleeping bag he was using for a bed and snatched the phone receiver from its cradle.

  It was Mike.

  “What gives? Don’t tell me you were still in bed?”

  Ben sighed. “Yes, Mike, I was still in bed. Sound asleep. Dreaming sweet dreams. Until you called.”

  “Well, you should thank me. It’s almost ten o’clock.”

  “And I do thank you, Mike. Truly.” He rubbed his tongue across his dry, fuzzy teeth. “I was up late attending a Raven festivity.”

  “Oh, well, that explains it. Get lucky?”

  �
��No,” Ben said immediately and with great force. “No, I most certainly did not get lucky.”

  “All right, all right, ease off. I’m not your mother.”

  “Is this why you called, Mike?”

  “Actually, no.” Ben heard him shuffling papers. “Dr. Koregai is starting his autopsy of Adams. I thought you ought to be there.”

  Ben felt an unpleasant sensation in his stomach. “Why in God’s name should I be there for the autopsy?”

  “Come on, Ben. Don’t wimp out on me now. You knew the man.”

  “What’s that got to do with the autopsy?”

  “I want you to be present when the evidence comes in. Besides, I have some new information to share with you.”

  Ben massaged his temples. “None of this convinces me that I need to be present for an autopsy.”

  “I think it’s important, Ben. Do it for me.” He paused. “If you won’t do it for me, do it for Bertha Adams.”

  Ben took a deep breath, men exhaled slowly. “I’ll meet you in twenty minutes,” he said. He slammed the receiver back into its cradle and started searching for his toothbrush.

  Ben arrived in twenty-five minutes, after stopping for his traditional early morning fix of chocolate milk. This was definitely a two-carton morning.

  He met Mike outside the coroner’s office and accompanied him into the examining room of Dr. Koregai, a middle-aged Japanese man who seemed to approach autopsies with the same matter-of-fact manner one might bring to disassembling a model airplane. Mike said he was the best. He was a little strange, true, but what do you expect from a man who cuts up corpses for a living? At least he wasn’t the type to tell jokes or eat lunch while he was cutting. He was very observant, if very temperamental. To get Koregai to answer your questions, Mike explained, you have to give him the impression that you’re here for the sole purpose of serving him in his quest for truth, justice, and autopsic excellence.

  Ben covered his mouth and nose with a paper towel as he entered the room. Be brave, he told himself. This is only the preliminary examination, not the actual postmortem. He considered the relative merits of watching a series of violations of bodily orifices as opposed to watching the slivering and dismembering of body tissues. He was barely in the room and he already felt ill.

  The first thing Ben noticed was the odor. The odor of formaldehyde and God knows what other chemicals were thick in the air. The second thing he noticed was a string quartet, Vivaldi, he thought, playing over the built-in intercom system. Maybe Koregai needed his nerves steadied, too.

  Three bright white ceiling lamps shone down on the mutilated corpse of Jonathan Adams. Ben stifled the instinct to gag. If anything, the body looked better now than when they had found it in the Dumpster. Most of the caked and coagulated black blood had been scraped away; the jaw and other loosened and detached body parts had been rearranged and returned to their proper places. The skin was an eerie, translucent color, sort of green and sort of not.

  Dr. Koregai took a thin rotor saw from his worktable and held it in his latex-gloved hands. His mouth and nose were covered by a blue mask.

  “If you could give us an idea about the cause of death,” Mike said, with extreme deference, “we might be able to obtain information in the field to assist you in detailing your report.”

  Evidently, the doctor’s talents included the ability to chat while he worked. “I already know how he was killed,” Dr. Koregai replied. “With a knife.”

  “What a breakthrough,” Ben mumbled under his paper towel.

  “The blade of the knife was three-quarters of an inch wide,” Koregai continued. “And it was serrated.”

  “Like a saw?” Ben asked.

  “Or a carving knife,” Mike suggested. “Unfortunately, even with that extra information, the weapon is still something you could find in nearly every home in Tulsa.”

  “But it’s not something a person would just happen to carry,” Ben thought aloud. “Unless he was planning to kill someone.”

  “What else could we possibly find that would help you, Doctor?” Mike asked obsequiously. “Point us poor working slobs in the right direction.”

  “Marks left on the neck by fingers,” Koregai noted, as if dictating a report. “Coupled with the bruises on the back and shoulders, it suggests the victim was pinned against a wall or floor. Probably a wall. He struggled to free himself—that explains the bruises on both elbows and his hands. Also, bruising of the throat and voice box indicates that the grip on his neck was quite strong.”

  “The killer overpowered Adams?”

  “Perhaps.”

  Ben took slow, deep breaths and tried to pretend he was in Rio. “You haven’t even mentioned that horrible blow to his face. And why so many gashes all over his body?”

  Dr. Koregai did not look up from his work. “Very low correlation of bruising to blows.”

  “No bruises?” Ben said. “What does that mean?”

  Mike turned to look at Ben. “It means Adams was already dead when the killer ventilated him,” Mike said. “Right, Doctor?”

  “Right.” Koregai set down the saw and took a thin stilettolike knife from his worktable. “Corpse was killed by two knife wounds, one through his head and neck and one to his torso. Mutilated afterward.”

  Ben heard himself literally gasp. The paper towel clung to his face.

  “One entry slit penetrated the floor of the skull, cut through the jugular vein, through the neck muscles between the arches of the first and second cervical vertebrae and just reached the center of the brain stem. He would’ve been unconscious immediately.”

  “Thank God for that,” Ben murmured.

  “But that left him defenseless,” Mike said. “It left his body at the mercy of the sick bastard who took him apart.” Mike took a step closer to Koregai. “Is there anything we could provide to help you reach a conclusion regarding the time of death, Doctor?”

  The doctor was holding the stiletto in one hand and using his free hand to peel away thin layers of skin and body fat from the corpse’s midsection. “I already know the time of death. Corpse’s body was still relatively warm when found. Over eighty-five degrees. Given that the murder was followed by a series of mutilations that took at least five to ten minutes, and given that the corpse, which would be quite heavy at that point, was dragged into a garbage Dumpster, I’d place the time of death at 10:15 or 10:30. Preliminary analysis of stomach contents also supports this estimate.”

  “Relatively early for a robbery-murder,” Mike mused. “Still a lot of people wandering around.”

  Ben nodded in agreement.

  “Anything else I can do for you, Dr. Koregai?” Mike asked.

  The doctor looked up briefly. “Not at this time. The lab work from Forensics should be done in a day or two. Anything new I discover during the p.m. will appear in my final report. If I require anything further, I’ll let you know.”

  “Aye, commandant,” Mike whispered. He turned to Ben. “Anything I can do for you, pal?”

  “Yeah,” Ben said. He looked toward the door and saw two orderlies wheeling in another cadaver. “Get me the hell out of here.”

  11

  BEN COOLED HIS HEELS in the outer lobby of Sanguine Enterprises.

  He noted that the entire area had been decorated in the orange and white colors of the Eggs ‘N’ Stuff trade logo. He made a mental note, in case he ever decorated a house or office, that orange was the least agreeable color for carpeting. Staring at it made him wish he had not eaten breakfast.

  Eventually, there was a buzz on the receptionist’s desk, then: “Mr. Sanguine can see you now.”

  Ben followed the woman—who, Ben noted with disgust, was wearing an orange and white dress—past a desk used by a security officer, through a winding corridor, and into the elevator lobby. After a short ride, they emerged on the second floor, which, she explained, was used exclusively for the offices of Sanguine and his vice presidents. Ben emerged from the elevator and walked down a long black marble-
tiled hallway to Sanguine’s office.

  Which was magnificent. Deep oak library paneling on all walls. Furniture that retained the rich hues of the woodwork. Snuffboxes, porcelain figurines, and other European objets d’art were scattered throughout the office. Tasteful framed paintings, mostly Old Master-style oils, lined the wall above Sanguine’s desk. The adjoining wall was lined with books from floor to ceiling. All hardback, mostly leather-bound volumes. The man who worked in this office was either a cultural connoisseur of the highest order, or wanted others to believe he was.

  In one corner, on the bottom shelf of a cabinet to the left of Sanguine’s desk, Ben spotted a display of Native American artifacts. Kachina dolls, tom-toms, turquoise jewelry. A tribute to his ancestry? Ben wondered. A tribute tucked away in a quiet corner in a room otherwise devoted to a celebration of European excellence. A curious man.

  Sanguine was poring over a stack of papers on his desk. Ben made a quiet, coughing noise. Sanguine looked up.

  “Ah, Ben, you’re here.” He stood and extended his hand. “I didn’t hear you come in. I get absorbed in the work sometimes.” Discounting the noisy hubbub of the Raven party, Ben was hearing Sanguine’s voice for the first time. It was a voice like still water, steady, even, strong, and without predictable inflection.

  Sanguine gestured toward the chair opposite his desk. “I was examining a new franchise contract.”

  Fascinating, Ben thought. “I see,” he said.

  Sanguine sat in his chair and leaned back comfortably. “So what can I do for you? Let me tell you up front, Ben, anything I can do to help out … Jonathan’s widow, I’m going to do. Jonathan was a loyal, hard-working executive who helped build this operation from the ground up and, to be frank, I admired him. What’s more, I respected him, and I believe he respected me. I wish I had more like Jonathan.”

  Ben watched the man as he talked. There was something slightly askew, something about the man, and his office, and the whole situation. Something didn’t seem right, even more than Sanguine’s not remembering Bertha’s name.