An Exaggerated Murder: A Novel

by Josh Cook

  “Seems a little, I don’t know, silly to follow an arrow.”

  “In the sewers … you’re against silly,” Max said with a sly smile.

  “Fair enough. You stay. I’ll go.”

  “Maintain visual contact. Turns out we don’t have sewer maps.”

  “I forgot how sarcastic you are in the field.”

  “Been a while … hasn’t it?”

  “We’ll ask Trike. He’ll tell us the day and the hour.”

  The last time they were in the field was two years, four months, three days, and one hour earlier. It was during The Case of the Riverside Gang, and Trike had sent them out to patrol one of the bridges while he followed a lead he correctly thought would connect the roving gang of muggers and assaulters with a local politician looking to use the crime spree as leverage in the upcoming mayoral and sheriff elections.

  They’d been out for four hours and were discussing the implications of Trike’s theory for the general political environment when they heard a woman scream. It was on the other side of the river and they were out of their hiding spots and running across the bridge before the screamer needed to catch her breath.

  When you hear one woman scream you expect a range of scenarios. Mugging. Assault. Attempted rape. You expect a struggle with some version of violence between a woman and at least one man. A simple situation for two professionals to handle. Already halfway across the bridge, Max and Lola saw a very complex situation. Three men, two women, at least two guns, and a backpack in the middle, most likely containing either drugs or guns. Not a one-woman-one-scream situation, and not the kind of thing two professionals rushing in expect to handle. Unless they got creative.

  “Follow my lead,” Lola whispered at Max once the severity of the situation became clear.

  She took off in front of him and began shouting for help. Max shouted, “Come back here, you bitch,” once he figured out the strategy. Everyone in the group looked at the pursuit approaching them. They were confused. Unnerved. Assaults weren’t supposed to run into drug deals. When Lola reached them, she transitioned her wild, shouting running into a series of rolls and throws that left both guns in her hands and everyone else on the ground. Max arrived and called the police while Lola covered the stunned group.

  Lola followed the red arrow, moving one step at a time, swinging the beam of her headlamp in a full circle in front of her before taking the next step. She found a second arrow pointing in the same direction. After a shouted conversation, Max met her at the new arrow, highlighting the route on the map.

  The subsequent arrow gave them a right turn.

  “Lo,” Max said at that arrow, “this might be what Trike warned us about.”

  “Following mysterious arrows?”

  “No. He’d … understand the arrows. It’s all the time … with no direction.”

  “We’ve been here less than an hour. Look, if you think we should conserve our time here, let’s do this. We’ll give the arrows another half an hour and if we don’t find anything, we’ll go back to the spot near the Joyce House, finish our full investigation of that, and call it.”

  “Agreed.”

  One arrow.

  Two arrows.

  Sometimes it’s enough to know misdirection is possible. Once you think about the possible interpretations of a series of red arrows and how the action of interpretation of a series of red arrows can be incorporated in their intention, consideration quickly devolves into the pantomime of logic used in Rock, Paper, Scissors. The key is keeping problems from becoming a matter of concluding that your opponent is about to throw Rock.

  Lola and Max found something after the third arrow.

  It was a round wooden object, about two feet high and two feet in diameter, slightly tapered at the top with white lines in triangles centered by white stars. A headlamp sweep revealed three more identical objects. Then they found three yard-long, two-by-four blocks painted in the same color scheme. Lola took a picture of each with her phone, adding a caption describing the object’s location.

  “I feel like I’ve seen things like this before, Max. How about you?”

  “Familiar? Yes. Relevant to escape? Not sure.”

  “But think about the sitting rooms. Joyce sculpts his environment. Even if these things aren’t directly involved in the escape, they still could be part of one of his settings.”

  “That listens,” Max said. “Let’s see what else we can find.”

  They found a chest of brightly colored, badly decayed fabrics. Lola laid out and photographed each fragment. Individually considered, it was clear they were clothes or costumes before the decay. Max examined the chest itself and found nothing.

  “Same as those other things,” Lola said, replacing the fabrics.

  “Familiar?”

  “Yeah.”

  “From a case?”

  “No, not from a case. From, I don’t know, life.”

  They heard voices. A hushed conversation. A look and a hand signal established their strategy. Lola took point, pressed against the wall with her headlamp turned off. Max was behind her, gun drawn, headlamp taken off but still lit and pointed straight down to provide necessary ambient light.

  As a former FBI field and deep-cover agent, Max initially assumed he’d take point in all dangerous situations. After Trike dispatched Gustav Mace’s hit squad, in thirty-four seconds, alone, hungover, Max figured he could do worse than cover the young buck.

  Max learned that Lola took point in one of the most terrifying minutes of his life. He and Lola were out in the field for only their second time together, staking out a chop shop, looking for the remains of a car that was stolen with a very special suitcase in the trunk. Max quickly counted the armed guards. Eight. Way more than the place normally had. With hand signals he told Lola he was going to text Trike the info and they were going to bail. She nodded.

  Max never really got a handle on the whole texting thing. Stubby fingers made his typing inaccurate. And then he’d get impatient, always hitting the number one time too many so he had to go all the way around again to get back to the right letter. And even then he had typos. And when you’re sending code, typos are a real pain in the ass. Max finally sent the message out.

  When he looked up there were only five guards in front of the chop shop. And they were all looking out his way. He’d lost track while he was texting. And three guards were about to flank them. He cursed under his breath and turned. Lola was nowhere to be seen. A bolt of terror shot through Max’s being. He’d never lost anybody in the field before and here he was about to lose a kid on her second trip out because he couldn’t get his fat fingers to text fast enough.

  Max assessed the situation. He began his strategic fallback, hoping Lola had enough common sense to get out of Dodge. He didn’t see Lola until he’d made it all the way back to their car, a mounting dread like he’d never felt before in every step he took. She was calmly waiting for him, the three guards unconscious and tied up just out of sight of the street. Then it all made sense.

  Before she could offer an explanation, Max said, “Lola Lenore, as in Roderick Lenore?”

  “Yep. He’s my dad.”

  All the explanation Max needed. Lola took point from then on.

  Perpendicular firelight revealed an upcoming intersection in the sewers. They heard a group of at least three men, fifty feet away, to the left. There was urgency in their voices. Anxiety. Fear.

  Another exchange of hand signals. Lola crouched and slid along the wall closer to the voices. Max stayed put so they wouldn’t see his light. After listening for a moment, Lola returned and waved them back to their previous location.

  “Some homeless guys,” she said when they arrived.

  “Sounded … agitated,” Max said with concern.

  Lola shrugged. “They were kicked out of an abandoned warehouse a couple of days ago. They’re worried about getting kicked out of here too. One of them might have a warrant out on him, but I’m guessing they pretty much live t
heir lives agitated.”

  “Question them … with financial incentives?”

  “They only got here two days ago.”

  Max nodded. “Back to the search, then.”

  “Yep.”

  Another arrow led them to a cluttered stretch of tunnel. There were three bureau-sized objects covered in mildewed sheets. Max pulled one sheet off in a dramatic gesture, imbuing the scene with more spores than gravitas. The object was a popcorn cart. The next, revealed with much less vigor, was labeled “PeaNuts.” The third was a calliope.

  “A circus,” Lola said. “That’s what this stuff is from. A circus.”

  Max nodded. “More stuff this way,” he said.

  The debris led them to a large, cluttered room. They found, in various stages of disintegration, disassembled trapezes, Indian clubs, longes and coils of rope, and a chambarrier, a Russian bar, and a unicycle, as well as stacks of wood and plywood, empty boxes, bolts of sturdy fabric, and jars of paint.

  Four additional hallways radiated from the larger room. Max and Lola divided the hallways and investigated ten paces into each one before returning to the large room.

  In her two hallways, Lola found a large metal makeup box, a podium, a whip, and a sturdy wooden chair. Five large metal hoops. Two padlocked steamer trunks. More clothes, ropes, and pieces of metal, wood, and masonry.

  Finally, she found a clipboard. The metal clip was rusted. There was writing directly on the degrading board. Most of the letters had faded beyond definitive identification, but Lola was able to make out two words: “Bloom” and “Code.”

  Max found a top hat, a vintage bicycle, and a slapstick. Three pairs of old spectacles. The handsets of three very early telephones. A pair of clown shoes. A bullhorn. A long heavy metal chain. Strongman’s weights. A wooden box with a slit in the top that might have been used to collect tickets. A whoopee cushion. The circus setting certainly gave the sewers a sculpted feel.

  Max had seen sculpted environments before. Twice, deep cover brought him to drug-lord mansions. They were a cross between theme parks, strip clubs, and military bases. Radical expressions of lives lived at atypical volumes. Peg kangaroo. Interior waterfall. Masterpieces of art. Mechanical beds. Women arranged like furniture. Gold-plated video-game consoles. Halls of mirrors. The mansions were externalized ids; desperate expressions of life from men who knew they could be shot to death, not just any day, but any moment. A highly orchestrated series of Ulysses references was not an externalization of the id. Heaven help the PI, if a highly orchestrated series of Ulysses references was the externalization of an id.

  “Max, I found something,” Lola said when they reconvened.

  “What?”

  “Two steamer trunks in pretty decent condition, locked with padlocks, and this clipboard. It looks like it was labeled to hold the ‘Bloom Code,’ ” she said, handing Max the clipboard.

  Max took it and squinted at the letters. “Bloom Code?”

  “Yeah. You can just see it there,” Lola said, pointing, “Bloom is the main character in Ulysses.”

  “Looks old,” Max said.

  “Sure, but you said yourself that it’s hard to determine the age of stuff down here because of the climate. Some of the circus stuff is definitely vintage, but who knows about everything else?”

  “And two locked steamer trunks.”

  “Exactly. I don’t think we’ve found anything indicating that Joyce escaped through here, but he was certainly arranging this stuff.”

  Max pondered the situation and its evidence, handing the clipboard back to Lola.

  “Okay,” he said, “You get pictures of the stuff in this room. I’ll poke around the piles of material. After a break topside we’ll return with bolt cutters and forensic equipment.”

  “Plan.”

  Lola went back through the room taking pictures of the various objects, the clipboard tucked under her arm, while Max poked around the piles of building material. He didn’t see anything until he reached a stack of large plywood boards leaning against a wall.

  “Huh,” he said as he flipped through them. Before he could investigate what caught his eye, they heard voices again, this time coming from the direction of the Joyce House. They hid in one of the hallways, again with Lola at point, and Max a step behind, gun drawn, headlamp in hand pointed down.

  Three men walked into the room with flashlights. They all wore the same kind of suit: a red one-piece jumpsuit made of a stiff plastic material that went over their shoes and zipped up the middle, with white stripes down the sides and arms, and cinched at the waist with white nylon belts.

  They walked with the air of routine inspection, not reacting whatsoever to the objects around them. Their posture and uniforms said they were innocent sanitation inspectors. Their conversation said anything but.

  “I don’t get why we have to put on these getups every time we come down here.”

  “Come on, you know how the boss is. There’s a system and goddammit he’s going to follow that fucking system no matter what.”

  “Lay off with that already. It’s his ass if we get seen down here without these outfits.”

  “How many times what we been down here and how many people we seen?”

  “You never know. Jesus, the way you go on you’d think they sewed a spiked retysnitch in the crotch of yours.”

  “I just don’t like doing things what I don’t see the point for.”

  “You ain’t been working your whole life?”

  “Yeah, and I been asking questions about this shit the whole time.”

  “How did you end up in the sewers again?”

  “Oh, that’s real nice coming from a guy what spun back odometers for a living.”

  “Least I can keep my trap shut. You’re worse than my wife after a spritzer.”

  “Oh, I’ll give your—”

  “Both of you can it. We’re stuck down here until we get the shit done and your little slap fight ain’t gettin’ the shit done. You got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Got it.”

  “Jesus, I’m e-mailing that Dante guy. Tell him to add a few more circles on the outside for schmoes like me who bailed on library fines …” The group passed out of earshot.

  Max and Lola waited a few moments to make sure they were gone. Then whispered out their next move.

  “Looked suspicious, Max.”

  “Yep. Let me check one more thing. Then … topside.”

  “I’ll keep a lookout.”

  “Plan.”

  Max and Lola quietly returned to the large room. Max went straight to the pile of plywood. Lola kept a lookout. After some frustrated finagling, Max pulled the board that caught his attention free from the others. He let out a low whistle. Turned around so Lola could see.

  It was a red placard. Written, in fading white circus font, was the phrase, “His Righteous Sentence.”

  Lola let out a low whistle. “Looks like somebody’s planning something, Max.”

  “It does.”

  Lola took a picture of the placard with her phone. They followed the arrows back to the intersection beneath the Joyce House and Max’s highlighted route back to their manhole. When Max was halfway up the ladder his phone beeped a new voice mail.

  “It’s from Trike,” he said as he finished ascending. Something heavy and shadowy fell to the pit of his stomach. He’d been working with Trike long enough to know that sometimes he called right after you got to the other side of the minefield to say thanks, but once he realized there were reading glasses in the glove compartment, the rest was elementary.

  “From when?” Lola asked as she followed, already consoling herself that if Trike solved the case without input from their investigation of the sewer, at least there was a pot of anonymous reward gold at the end of that disappointment rainbow.

  “ ’Bout forty minutes ago.”

  They got back to the surface. Replaced the manhole cover. Packed up their lights and gloves and the clipboard. Lola checked
her phone while Max listened to the message. She’d missed a call from Trike about the same time.

  Max’s face fell as a Mount Rushmore face would fall.

  “What?” Lola said.

  Max handed her the phone. “Press three to repeat.”

  Lola did.

  Trike’s voice mail said, “Maxish, just checking in. Nothing important. Though, I couldn’t get Lola either, which is a bit strange. Makes me wonder … Huh…………… If for some reason you two, against my better judgment, decided to go tromping around the sewers, you might want to know there’s some circus stuff down there left over from a failed movie studio. They were working on a kind of Grapes of Wrath set in the circus when they went out of business in 1952. The movie was called His Righteous Sentence, also taken from ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ if you’re keeping track, and it was directed by a man named Henry Bloomfeld. If you still feel like solving a mystery in the sewers, nobody seems to know how the circus stuff got there from where the studio was. The original theory was that the studio owner meant to hide the stuff from his creditors and then resell it on the sly, but who knows? A good place to start would be The Daily Register as they had someone looking into it a couple of years ago, but, since they never ran the story, I imagine they didn’t come up with anything. The sanitation inspectors might have an idea about the logistics of the place. I know they still have to go through there even though it’s only been used for emergency runoff since 1940, though I doubt they’d be in a good mood if you saw them; some kerfuffle over new sanitation suits or something. Anyway, give me a call and I’ll catch you later. And remember to bring a sweatband to wear under your headlamp. Way more comfortable. See you tonight at the office for the stakeout. Trike signing out.”

  Lola deleted the message and handed the phone back to Max.

  “I’m glad this was your phone, Max,” she said in a tone that was dead inside.

  “Why?”

  “If it’d been my phone, I would have thrown it on the ground as hard as I could and I can’t afford a new one.”

  “Passed it to you so the same impulse would ebb,” Max said.

  “You’re a smart man, Max. A very smart man.”