An Exaggerated Murder: A Novel

by Josh Cook

  The color spilled from The Mayor’s face. Lungs, not tonsils.

  “They—someone shot at you?”

  Trike shrugged. “They weren’t too interested in hitting me. Just made a vague threat about The Joyce Case.”

  “The Joyce Case?”

  “ ’Least your ears work. It was odd. Once the real estate world became involved, I figured a busybody like you with an inflated sense of self-importance had to be nosing around. But then I couldn’t figure out how you’d make a profit on it. Busybodying is one thing, but you’ve got a lifestyle to maintain. And there’s no way you’ve got the intelligence to be in charge, or the executive or administrative ability to be delegated even a supporting role. So, I guessed you’d have your ear to the ground, just in case something worth your while came up. But then someone goes and quite forcefully suggests your involvement. Why do you think they would do that?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “It gets stranger. ’Cause it’s your car, they might as well have left a trail of gold-plated bread crumbs to their identity.”

  “Trike, before you go on—”

  “We’re not on a first-name basis.”

  “Listen, I’m just going to be honest with you, since there is no point in hiding things from you—”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I just want to come clean with you—”

  “Still lying.”

  “This is something I need to get off my chest—”

  “Lying.”

  “Okay. Fine. When the next election cycle comes around—”

  “Ohmygod, still lying. But trying harder.”

  “Damnit, Trike! What do you want me to tell you?”

  “Where Joyce is.”

  “I don’t know. I never met him. I knew some of the stuff about the property, like you said, but it was all so minor, I didn’t pay much attention to it. To me, it actually looked aboveboard. Stupid but legal.”

  “Why did you sell him your car?”

  The Mayor shrugged. “Legally, I didn’t. I was offered twice the Blue Book value for it by a proxy whose name I’m sure you can determine, if you haven’t already. I’d been looking to upgrade for a while, and I saw this as my chance. Obviously, I would have rethought my decision if I knew he was going to use it to send you here, but, as it stands, I haven’t done anything, well, prosecutable. I’ll even give you the name of the guy who bought it.”

  “When did you know the sale was connected to Joyce?”

  The Mayor shrugged again. His casual shrug. “Well, I didn’t know it was connected with The Joyce Case until just now. It was implied, but not with any kind of certainty.”

  “Implied how?”

  “They told me that it was being purchased for someone maintaining a low profile who was willing to pay a little extra for discretion. As I’m sure you know, that is not a small group of potential buyers.”

  Trike looked over The Mayor’s shoulder. It was dusted with dandruff from beneath his designer toupee. Trike sat there for ninety-eight seconds.

  “That doesn’t make sense. I can’t think of a way for that to make sense. Even as a red herring, it’s stupid.”

  “People do strange things sometimes, Trike.”

  “No. We replace lack of information with lack of sense. It makes sense to the psychopath. And we’re still not on a first-name basis.”

  “Then I suppose there’s nothing more I can do for you,” The Mayor said, leaning back in his chair, as if he’d put a lot of effort into the conversation.

  “I suppose not.”

  Trike stood up. He eschewed The Mayor’s outstretched hand and went to the door. He opened it partway, stopped, and turned back to The Mayor.

  “Well, Mr. Mayor, there is just one more thing.”

  “Oh, Christ.”

  “Just a little thing I can’t keep track of in my head, totally for my own benefit, I just like to get all of these things straightened out.”

  “Mr. Augustine—”

  “Finally, I’m Mr. Augustine.”

  “Mr. Augustine, that spiel only works for Columbo because he convinces the criminals that he isn’t very smart so they fall into his traps. You, on the other hand, never let anybody forget that you’re a genius.”

  “Oh, it’s not that at all, Mr. Mayor. In fact, it’s probably nothing at all, I just, these things, they just get caught in my head and bother me until I get them straightened out.”

  “You’re still doing it.”

  “Oh no, no, not at all, I just have a thing about loose ends, you know, they keep me up at night, and I’m sure an important person like you knows all about being kept up at night.”

  The Mayor slapped his desk with a flat palm. “You’re not going to stop. Because you’re a fucking arrogant bastard who just does whatever the fuck he wants.”

  “It’s just a little thing, I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical explanation for it, that I just can’t figure out myself—”

  “Okay, fine. Fucking fine. I own five percent of Gold Cup Casinos Incorporated and that’s why I funneled those campaign contributions to the referendum supporters in the next county. Okay. Just fucking stop that.”

  “I was just going to ask why you got anti-glare treatment on your windshield. Makes it practically impossible for the defroster to work in the winter. But I’ll keep that other thing in mind, you know, in case something else comes up.”

  Trike clicked his tongue for goodbye and walked out. Left the door open.

  THE TWENTY-TWO BROKEN BONES

  The office walls radiated hatred. The desk seethed loathing. The carpet oozed disgust. His own eyes looked upon themselves with acidic disdain. After three hours, seventeen minutes, and forty-three seconds of recording, reviewing, analyzing, and imagining data, every facet of every surface Trike could see, feel, and smell had become a font of awful.

  Max and Lola had left for the day. Another fifty grand essentially gone. If there was one bright spot, Trike did enjoy the looks on their faces when he gave them the police reports to investigate. Since then it’d been just the data grind.

  Some of the work of private detecting made for good TV. The other 99 percent was as exciting as doing your taxes. And as a small-business owner and private consultant, a lot of it was actually doing his fucking taxes.

  But he couldn’t quit it. He didn’t know the answer so he couldn’t quit it. He just had to get out of the office. Before something unreasonable became reasonable. He packed up the ten notebooks he’d been using to quickly visualize different arrays of data and slammed the door on his way out. He muttered, “One could argue that the true point of ‘The Purloined Letter’ has nothing to do with detecting, but rather, is to provide a succinct and complete definition of … friendship,” while he walked to the car.

  The diner was one of Trike’s places. They let him nurse bottomless coffee. Order off-menu. Take up a booth. Smiled warmly when he called himself “The Baconator.”

  Trike waved for coffee as he sat down at his booth. Pushed a week’s worth of newspapers to the side of the table. Took out his notebooks. Continued his work from the office.

  Trike was looking for money. It was a crass oversimplification of the chaotic complexity of human experience, but it was a productive axiom. Usually the person who held the money held the gun. Trike could find no money in whatever Joyce was up to. The time at the office, plus the subsequent fifty-five minutes at the diner, plus the less-focused speculations that piled up over the course of the investigation, all pointed to the same conclusion. Joyce was up to something, but there was no money in it.

  Mid-fifth sip of his third cup of coffee, Trike decided to ride another old gray mare of detection. Once you rule out money, you’re left with love and revenge. So Trike shuffled the notebooks around in the hopes that a mosaic of revenge would emerge from their pattern.

  Another forty-three minutes and no mosaic. But revenge felt plausible. The next logical option was to pick random actors in the case and run possi
ble scenarios that matched with Joyce seeking revenge on them, eliminating those determined impossible. Thinking of the procedure gave Trike something like a headache. Something like a headache that swallowed an atom bomb and crop-dusted all over his waning hopes for happiness.

  He packed away the notebooks and dragged the pile of newspapers in front of him. It was a mess of a week’s worth of the city’s two papers. Instinctively, Trike organized the pages into sections, and the sections into editions, separating those into two chronological piles.

  The big story in both papers was the sexual assault and murder of a teenage girl at one of the city’s nightclubs. The atrocity of the murder and the youth and beauty of the victim conspired to produce intense excitement.

  She was found savagely beaten in the alley behind the club, in a position that suggested her murderer was attempting to dispose of her body in a Dumpster. All the evidence related in the papers suggested that this was an ordinary crime, atrociously committed. Probably a boy she’d gone to the club with. Got too close. Things got out of hand.

  “Probably should just solve this,” Trike mumbled to himself as he read.

  “What was that, hon?” Matilda called from behind the counter.

  “Oh, nothing, Matilda, just muttering to myself. But, actually, could you put in an order for some wheat toast?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Thanks. You’re the best.”

  The Daily Standard took particular tabloid glee in listing the injuries. Trike had to assume the list was accurate, as a sensationalist newspaper would never dare such a catalog of wounding if it were not true. The Register was terser but no less effective at communicating the viciousness of the assault. It was a crime like thousands of other crimes, but for the twenty-two broken bones. “Mental illness in here somewhere. Or something else atypical,” Trike theorized.

  As time passed and no discovery ensued, a thousand contradictory rumors were circulated. Gangs were imagined. Drug dealers. Perverts. The almost-forgotten name of a never-caught serial killer. Somehow a theory about an escaped ape from the nearest zoo found its way into print.

  But Trike could read, from the details the police provided, that they had a good idea of who the killer was. Something was preventing them from making the arrest. They had the truth but not the evidence. It is a fact of detecting life, that much of what is rejected by the court is the best evidence to the intellect. That’s the other thing left out of the movies. The truth had to be subjected to a second process, after discovery, for it to become evidence in a court of law.

  “Here’s your toast, hon,” Matilda said, dropping off the order.

  “Thanks, Matilda.”

  “Let me know if you need anything else. Or just mutter under your breath.”

  “Thanks.”

  The more he read, the more he was convinced. And the more he knew about the killer. It was a minor, probably a kid from the high school. His family had money. And a lawyer who had specifically instructed him on what to say and what not to say. There was a piece missing. Some act of confirmation the police needed before they could get a warrant. If it hadn’t been raining the night of the murder they would’ve wrapped this up the morning after. Now they had to hope the kid said something he’d been instructed not to say.

  The door opened. Horn-Rims walked in like somebody broke the only bowling trophy he was proud of. Heaved himself onto a counter stool. Nodded for coffee. Being demoted didn’t change the fact that Horn-Rims was the best homicide detective in the city. He had to be on the girl’s case.

  A terrifying idea flashed across Trike’s mind. A horrifying idea. An embarrassing idea. An idea that made the very core of Trike’s detecting identity shudder with disgust. Goddamn, he wanted a cigarette.

  Trike heaved himself onto a stool next to Horn-Rims. Horn-Rims jumped when he noticed who sat next to him.

  “What the fuck do you want?” he asked.

  “Information exchange.”

  “I don’t have time to mess around with your little game of tiddlywinks.”

  “I can put him at the scene of the crime.”

  Horn-Rims grunted.

  “Since it’s a kid at the high school,” Trike continued, “I can put him at the scene of the crime on the night in question.”

  The coffee arrived.

  “All right, hotshot, you can shit in my ear if it makes you feel better. But then buzz off. I’ve got lives on the line.”

  “That club is exclusive. Even on the all-ages dance nights, it’s hard to get in. Low capacity. Dress code. Guest lists. That kind of thing. Kids at the high school keep their ticket stubs in their wallets as a status symbol. Whoever this kid is, he’s not a professional. That ticket stub went right in his wallet the second he got it back from the doorman and it’s still there. And it’s dated. If his parents or their lawyers are stonewalling you, you can place him at the club on the night in question.”

  Horn-Rims took a deep breath. A long sip of coffee. A longer sip of coffee. He nodded for a refill. When Matilda came over, he ordered a Reuben.

  “Someone has been systematically removing every honest cop from The Joyce Case,” he said. “One demotion and a bunch of reassignments. A lot of other paperwork isn’t getting done. The case is getting pushed around and pushed around with nobody doing anything about it and without being closed. As of yesterday, pretty much all work on it has stopped.”

  “Why?”

  Horn-Rims shrugged. “Don’t know what the point is, but the result seems to be that you’re the only one with any chance to solve the case.”

  Trike took a deep breath. He went back to his booth. He added the new information to one of his notebooks. He nibbled at his toast. He slapped on a nicotine patch.

  He tore precise blank corners off notebook pages. Arranged them in three rows in front of him. Then, consigning one letter to each scrap, he wrote, “Why does it matter who solves the case?” He stared at the arrangement of information. It started misting outside, again.

  He needed something else. He knew where to get it. It was time to see The Lady on the Corner.

  He swept up the scraps of paper and stuffed them in his pocket. It was 2:47 a.m. She’d be out by the time he could scrape together every last bit of cash he had access to. Finally, quitting smoking returned a tangible reward. He probably had an extra hundred bucks kicking around. And The Lady on the Corner’s intel was expensive.

  He called Max as he walked to his buff insult to the American automobile industry, to see if Max had any useful amount of cash handy. Max didn’t. Even half-conscious, Max could tell from the question that Trike was heading to see The Lady.

  “Reached that point,” Max mumbled.

  “We have,” Trike confirmed.

  Trike got into the car. He couldn’t drive and talk at the same time, so he finished up his conversation with Max.

  “Hoping for anything?” Max asked.

  “I’m beginning to suspect that this is an act of revenge, Maxilicious. I’m hoping The Lady on the Corner will tell me the who and who of the relationship.”

  Max mumbled something that was probably an approximation of “Good luck.”

  “And good luck to you,” Trike responded. “I’d wish you sweet dreams, but I’d much rather you dreamt about revenge.”

  Trike hung up.

  The Lady on the Corner. Goddamn.

  Trike popped a piece of nicotine gum. Then began the cabalistic ritual of starting his car.

  THE VOID

  Trike lurched into the office. The opening door smacked one of the filing cabinets stuffed into the small room. Max was arranging a stock of filled legal notepads on his desk.

  “Anything, Max?” Trike asked as he hung up his coat.

  Max gestured at the stack of notebooks as if revealing prizes on a game show. “Same old, same old,” he said.

  “Jesus. I can only imagine what Lola turned up with her half of the reports.”

  “No need,” Max said.

  He pi
cked up an accordion folder from between his desk and the office fern and waggled it at Trike.

  “What the fuck is going on here, Max?”

  “You saw The Lady on the Corner. What’d she tell you?”

  Trike leaned against the doorway to his office. He focused on a spot on the ceiling. Then started talking.

  “The Old-Timer sent me to her. I trusted his opinion, but I didn’t put much stock in it, if you know what I mean. And when I saw her for the first time, I didn’t know what to expect. The corner. The costume of rags. The precise schedule. But when she told me that Frank Foer and Sons was a concealed subsidiary of Arthur Train International, I knew she was the real deal. It wouldn’t have meant anything to anybody else, but to me, it meant the stolen Van Gogh was in a deposit box at John Lloyd Brokers and Hedge Fund Managers.

  “The second time, she told me the Sainted Moore was scheduled to leave San Francisco on December 15, which sounded like a bad joke about spy code, but told me George Joseph Smith was actually the foreign-currency trader Adam Wirth, whose faked death was imminent. The third time, she just gave me the address of the U.S. embassy in Sofia. Anybody else would have thrown their cash on the ground and stormed off cursing her name, but it made me realize the money was being funneled into a spurious charter jet company so it could be recovered in bankruptcy insurance held by an investment bank.

  “And this time. This time, Max,” Trike popped a piece of nicotine gum, “she told me that Joyce is using this whole mess to get revenge on someone.”

  “You knew that,” Max responded.

  “And when I made that point she said, ‘You suspected it. Very different. Now you know for sure and can act accordingly.’ Which is true, but not actionable.”

  “Expensive?”

  “She was icing three very-poor-decision-making thugs when I showed up, so she had me do a song-and-dance eyewitness number for the police, making a very long night a whole helluva lot longer and markedly more unpleasant.”

  Max shrugged. “Kept your money.”

  “There is that.”

  “So what’s the plan, boss?”

  Trike blew a concentrated stream of air out of his mouth. “You got more work to do on the reports?”