An Exaggerated Murder: A Novel

by Josh Cook

  ON MARTY McSORLEY

  When you have no money, you get what you get. It’s worse when you’re on a schedule. And it’s not like there’s a big two-ton windowless van market.

  Max checked the classifieds. Went through Swap ’n’ Sell. Searched the Internet. Made some calls. With no money, on a schedule, Max got a van.

  A guy he knew told him about a heavy-metal band calling it quits. The bassist was looking to unload their tour van. He needed money for a sensible car and room in his garage. And his wife was getting on his case. It wasn’t the easiest van to sell. Where would we be if these things never worked out?

  So Trike and Max were parked two streets from the Joyce House, in a two-ton windowless van. Its base color was a vivid metallic blue. Painted on each side was a massive wizard, complete with a long white beard, flowing gray robes, crystal-ball-topped gnarled wooden staff, and tall pointy gray hat, bursting from a tsunami. Titling the scene, on each side, in lightning font, was the word “Thalassacreteo!” The exclamation point was, of course, a lightning bolt.

  On a street where an idling UPS van would stand out, in a neighborhood that learned about windowless vans from America’s Most Wanted, Trike and Max told themselves that a sorcerer-themed heavy-metal van was less suspicious than a plain one. Max let the police know they’d be there, just in case.

  To set it up for the stakeout, Max removed the back set of seats. He bolted a set of modular bookshelves to the frame. Four scrounged TVs filled the shelves. Each one was connected by an adapter to a wireless remote-control camera covering one of the square house’s sides. They bought the cameras years ago, with some of their small-business startup loan.

  Trike and Max sat on sharp metal folding chairs that had been left in the office by the previous tenants. Empty espresso beverage cans and empty potato-stick tubes cluttered the floor around Trike’s chair. Max’s ring was composed of empty Frescas and beef jerky bags. Trike and Max had already dried out their eyes for twelve hours.

  Hadn’t worn out their jaws yet.

  “That is my point,” Max continued.

  “That Marty McSorley is the professional-hockey manifestation of the Richard III effect, in that he was compelled by the peculiar gravity of Western culture to be as thuggish as his name sounds.”

  “No. What?”

  Trike shrugged. “Idea appeared the instant you said his name. Figured I’d get it out. You know. Aneurism prevention.”

  “Because it’ll be an aneurism.”

  “Better safe than keeling over while loosening bituminous sands into an over-capacity refinery.”

  “What?”

  Trike popped a piece of nicotine gum in his mouth. “Never mind. Please continue. You were about to, against all odds, prove there is a logical reason for grown men to start punching each other in the face in the context of a professional sporting event.”

  “That’s … an intentionally ridiculous phrase.”

  “I gotta say, Max, of the fifty-three phrases I considered, that one was the least inherently ridiculous. However, given your intellectual quality, I eagerly await your argument. If the edge of my seat weren’t so sharp, I’d be right on it.”

  “Safety.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Because of physics.”

  “Eat the spilled fuck of a wobbling donkey truck.”

  Max soldiered on. “Estimate how hard a strong man can punch another man. Factor in that they’re on ice skates.”

  Trike looked away. Absentmindedly scratched a wide nostril. “All right.”

  “That should be the upper limit of things, given … equipment, defense, the like.”

  “Entered into the official record of this argument as the upper limit of things.”

  “Now, calculate how hard a player moving at roughly twenty miles per hour can hit another player with a shoulder or elbow.”

  “I did psi for punch.”

  “Do force … fewer variables.”

  “Right. Okay.” Trike looked away again. Scratched the other nostril. Then he said, “Huh.”

  “See. The severe risk of injury—”

  “You may continue if you are compelled, as I understand there is a level of satisfaction in sharing your own reformulations of existing knowledge, but I have discerned the entirety of your argument.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “To protect players from the catastrophic potential of certain kinds of hits, a defense mechanism evolved in which Marty McSorley—”

  “There are other enforcers.”

  “He is the Yggdrasil from which they all sprang.”

  “Of course. He is … what you said.”

  Trike slapped a nicotine patch on his arm. “To continue, in order to discourage potentially catastrophic hits, Marty McSorley fought opponents he believed put his teammates in jeopardy through such hits.”

  “Well done. But there’s more.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  “The biggest reason for fighting in the last twenty years was … the holding penalty.”

  “The holding penalty?”

  “The holding penalty,” Max said.

  “Now you’re just fucking saying whatever.”

  “The logic is sound.”

  “I have to say, Max, that although I appreciate the sentiment, being a professional and dedicated practitioner for much of my life, I feel a moral obligation to state that sound logic is not always as sound as you would like it to be, but that is not at issue here. Please proceed.”

  “In the eighties and nineties the holding penalty was laxly enforced. As long as an arm wasn’t wrapped completely around, players could get away with clutching and grabbing.”

  Trike popped a piece of nicotine gum into his mouth. “Seems to me, Max-O, that something fundamental was lost.”

  “Pretty much. Now—”

  Max was cut off by the first activity they’d seen. The Butler was at the front gate.

  He wore beige corduroys and a pale-blue button-down shirt with a gray cabled sweater. He carried a tote bag with a skein of yarn and two long metal knitting needles.

  “Is this going to be the day?” Trike mumbled to himself. “Will this be it?”

  “Will this be what?” Max mumbled back.

  Trike zoomed in with the appropriate camera. The Butler took the newspaper out of the box. He looked at it in its plastic sleeve.

  “It is,” Trike whispered. “It is.”

  “It is what?” Max exasperated.

  The Butler sighed. Stood next to the newspaper box. He tapped the box once with the paper, and then walked up the path to the house.

  “Ha!” Trike exclaimed with a clap of his hands. “Today is the day.”

  “The day for what?” Max Max-level shouted.

  “The day The Butler puts a hold on the newspaper subscription. You were prattling on about holding, Max.”

  Max rolled his eyes. “You drive a man to drink, boss.”

  “Just imagine what it’s like on the inside of this,” Trike said, tapping his forehead.

  Max sighed. Figured he might as well continue. “Players could slow down goal-scorers. They could just … grab Gretzky—”

  “I can sum up this one too, if you like.”

  “Charming habit.”

  “To get opponents to stop not-quite-holding Gretzky, Marty McSorley punched them in the face.”

  “Correct.”

  Trike popped a piece of nicotine gum. “Is this a parable, Maxitus, something passed down from the wise old hat to the dashing young upstart?”

  Max smirked. “I’ll never tell.”

  For the rest of the day, they followed The Butler’s movements through the house by the lights he turned on. He spent most of the day in the kitchen, most likely knitting. He went to the bathroom three times. Wandered into a couple of the sitting rooms. Watched TV for 3.7 hours.

  Trike and Max each took a three-hour break. Got some air. Stretched their legs. Ate food that didn’t come wrapped in sealed plastic.
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  When Max left, Trike moved his chair back against the opposite wall so he could see all four screens at once. He set his hat upturned on the floor in front of him. He adjusted its position several times, to ensure that it was in his field of vision. He took a pack of playing cards from his trench coat pocket. Threw them one by one into the hat, while he watched the screens.

  The unspeakable things he would have done for a cigarette.

  Trike divided his brain into three distinct functioning sections. The first consumed the information projected by the screens. The second backtracked from the tampered-with information to identify employees, associates, and other likely allies in the tampering effort. The third told stories about Joyce and money, eliminating those not possible given known information. He tossed cards to use up anything that remained, lest it occupy itself with visions of cigarettes and Lola.

  And something watchful and silent remained. Without an image. Without a term. Assessing the assessing. Something that usually signaled when other processes were right, wrong, or the third thing.

  When he finished the deck, he reached out with his foot and dragged his hat within reach. Collected the accurate cards. Left the inaccurates where they were. One character trait was confirmed in all the processes Trike ran. Drawn from the clothes in the closet, the displays in the sitting rooms, the general state of the interior and the upkeep of the exterior of the house, Trike knew Joyce was meticulous in what he presented to the world. A self-hiding meticulousness, which meant one always thought Joyce looked nice, but never remembered what he wore.

  While Trike was gone, Max listened to Charlie Parker on his iPod. He had his notebook ready in case anything happened on his shift. Nothing happened on his shift.

  Max had a professionally trained level of focus, but even that ran out after watching nothing happen in a big house. With the four screens and the Charlie Parker, Max inexorably wondered about the inside of Trike.

  Trike described columns of text, tickers of information, topographical concept maps, and, of course, multiple screens. So Max had some metaphors but metaphors didn’t solve the mystery he was curious about.

  Max remembered what computers were like when he got started, knew what computers were like before that, and used the agency laptop. If physics allowed us to go from the computer of the ’50s to the computer of now, biology should let us go from Max to Trike. So the scale wasn’t the mystery.

  With the Charlie Parker on and nothing happening in the house, Max tried to imagine what it felt like. As usual, he came up with a big, massive monolith of no idea.

  Trike had Max search him for cigarettes when he got back. There were none. Trike also had Max give him a thorough smell-down to ensure any sneaked cigarettes would be detected and shamed. None detected. But Max was a smoker so his sense of smell wasn’t definitive.

  At six p.m., The Butler left. Two hours later, the stakeout hit the twenty-four-hour mark.

  Trike sighed. “Let’s pack up, Max.”

  Max gave a quick nod and started unplugging cords. Trike collected the trash in a garbage bag.

  While Max coiled cords, he asked, “What were we looking for?”

  “I was hoping for some kind of warrant-generating indication that Joyce was still in the house.”

  “Hidden in plain sight … ‘Purloined Letter.’ ”

  Trike popped a piece of nicotine gum into his mouth. “No, Max. Hiding in the basement. As I prove in my presentation, ‘The Purloined Letter’ is bullshit.”

  “I know you think that.”

  Trike shrugged. “At the risk of incurring the universe’s harshest of punishments for hubris, there usually isn’t a big difference between what I think and what is true.”

  Max shook his head. Started packing up that which was not bolted to shelving or frame. “Do you think Joyce is still in the house?”

  Trike paused in the middle of knotting the garbage bag. Twenty-seven seconds later he said, “Much less likely but not impossible.”

  “Eating MREs in the basement?”

  “Exactly. But if he is, he’s not contacting the outside world.”

  “Anything else get more likely?”

  Trike’s hands went toward his pockets as if cigarettes were there. He found gum and patches. Looked Max right in the eye and said, “Not one fucking thing.”

  LOOK AT THIS FUCKING COLOR CHART

  Buying a house is one of those convergences of brain-sploding complexity and eye-melting boredom uniquely able to break spirits. Even when it’s just one person buying a house from another, there are pre-approvals, points, mortgage rates, closing costs, credit checks, realtor commissions, inspections, and more. You throw in a corporation looking to dodge taxes, claim losses, file income as capital investment, and the like, and a boring stupid tedious hedge maze is transported to a five-dimensional warped-gravity version of itself. That’s still boring.

  But the Joyce House Limited purchase of the Joyce House was the simplest real estate transaction Lola had ever seen. One cash payment for the undisclosed price of the house, including all the closing and inspection fees, to the estate of Miss Martha Clifford. One deed. One transfer. Since nothing in the case thus far had been simple, Lola dug deeper.

  Joyce House Limited wasn’t publicly traded, so Lola could only discover so much. She learned that Joyce was steward of the property, appointed by an unidentified “executive board.” Lola couldn’t find a revenue stream, what the company was incorporated to do, or even a phone number. Just a P.O. box and the statement of stewardship. She had seen a lot of shady businesses in her day and this was shaping up to be the shadiest. But from what she could tell, a company that did nothing and made no money was on the up and up. Something was wrong. Lola looked up, blinking from the collating, and realized that the innocence was the suspicion. And that was enough of that.

  She turned her attention to the estate of Miss Martha Clifford. The house was the only property in the estate and the executor was not a member of the Clifford family, but a lawyer working for a small firm in Santa Fe. A firm that spent most of its time on cases involving trade between the United States and Mexico.

  Lola had never been so happy to see crime. The Miss Martha Clifford estate was a front set up by Mina Kennedy. In the 1920s, Kennedy ran a brotheling and bootlegging empire in the Mid-Atlantic states, before developing an international smuggling operation once Prohibition had ended. Before she died, she set up the estate to leave the Joyce House to her daughter Lydia and allow Lydia to sell the house without the scrutiny of a dozen different law enforcement agencies in seven countries.

  But Lola couldn’t find any connection between the front estate and The Joyce Case. The evidence indicated that Joyce House Limited believed the estate was legitimate. So Lola turned her attention to the incorporation of Joyce House Limited itself. Perhaps crime loitered there.

  What Lola found was horrifying. Insult to reason. Abomination of nature. Affront to god. But no crime.

  There’s nothing worse in detective stories than the breakthrough moment. The character stops what they’re doing; mid-stride if walking, mid-word if talking, mid-fuck if fucking, and, if this is the moving pictures we’re talking about, the actor has to make with the wide eyes and maybe open the mouth a little and maybe leak a few words like, “But Summer Street is one-way on that block,” and then the dramatic rush off to somewhere leaving everybody hanging ’cause there’s just no time to waste.

  Lola didn’t do the breakthrough, or rather, Lola had one breakthrough when she first started doing research for Trike and it’s been a matter of form and time ever since. And it wasn’t a breakthrough of finding two and two and making four. It was inventing the plus sign.

  Research presents three distinct but not necessarily disconnected challenges: finding data, sifting data, and organizing data.

  If the individual under investigation is Average Joe, the challenge is finding data. Most people don’t leave much of a paper trail and most of that paper trail—credit-ca
rd receipts, bills, wills, and the like—taunted you from behind a barbed-wire fence made of you don’t have a warrant yet. Sometimes you’ve got to bug, sometimes you’ve got to tail, and sometimes you’ve got to hack. Which was not as hard for Lola as it would be for you. She owned quiet shoes and kept her head down while walking in them, hacking is easy when you’re only looking, and very few average Joes and Josephines could keep their traps shut when Lola asked questions.

  For the average Joe, the data is hard to get but easy to sift. The important stuff stands right out. Booked a flight to Cancún. Stayed late on a Friday for the first time. Started paying for everything in cash.

  Public figures presented the opposite problem. The public, for some reason, wanted to keep track of what their elected and appointed officials were doing with themselves, and so there was always plenty of reading materials on governors, senators, representatives, diplomats, and the like, even before revealing the information they tried to hide. Same thing for presidents and executives of corporations. Generally, the more people who thought you were important, the more you were supposed to keep track of yourself. So when millions of dollars are going back and forth, the trick is finding the $250,000 that went to Topeka instead of Ottawa. Which was not as hard for Lola as it would be for you. Lola inherited a monomaniacal focus she could turn on and the mental and physical stamina needed to use it for hours at a time. She could sit there and read three years’ worth of transactions in one marathon session. Just happened to be part of the whole hand-she was-dealt thing.

  But data is nothing to a detective until it is turned into information through an organizational and analytical system. It’s one thing to find out Billy Criminal went from Las Vegas to Sacramento to Seattle to Anchorage and another to see he rented a car from a different rental agency in each state and another to know he stopped using his credit card in Seattle and started writing checks in Anchorage, but another entirely to figure out what all that means.

  Which was not as hard for Lola as it would be for you. Lola had a system.

  Before embarking on a research assignment, Lola generated or received from Trike a list of keys: words, phrases, categories, terms, numbers. And she would associate each key with a color. Dollar green, for example, or blood red, or anything within the variation that someone who studied color theory in the course of formal artistic education could imagine.