by Josh Cook
“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. And if his parents or their lawyers or someone 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 paperwork just 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 slunk back to his booth. He left the diner a few minutes later.
Disaster. Top to bottom. The whole case was shit. Pure and utter shit. And it wouldn’t get better when they found the stub in the kid’s wallet. It was there all right. Being right had nothing to do with what kind of person you were.
But he had to get the wallet in a constitutionally allowed manner. Anything remotely questionable and the kid would walk. The case would go cold. Frank wouldn’t get the help he needed. And then, some night in college, he’d get drunk or he’d just get mad and he’d beat another girl to death. And then he’d go to a real bad prison and stay there a real long time.
Matilda cleared the dishes from Trike’s booth. Collected the newspapers that were piled there. She stood by the booth for a moment, looking out the window. “Raining again,” she muttered. She put the papers on the pile on the bar and took the dirty dishes to the kitchen.
She brought Horn-Rims’s Reuben with her on her way out.
The pickle was floppy.
The fries were soggy.
The slaw was runny.
The Reuben tasted like Justice.
Horn-Rims ate it without stopping.
Horn-Rims had a long talk with the DA about Frank Geyer’s wallet. There were a million ways to get a teenager’s wallet, but not many led to admissible evidence. They could pull him over while he was driving and ask for his wallet instead of just his license. They could contrive something at school; a survey or a study or something, and go through everyone’s wallet. They could tail him and nab him for jaywalking or bust him on some blue law nobody’d enforced in a century. But the worst lawyer in the world would slap those right out of court.
Each time they ruled out an option, the DA said something like, “Don’t you have anything else on this guy that I could get a warrant for?” and each time Horn-Rims responded that the stub was the only thing they might have that might lead to a warrant.
After the tenth time around that track, Horn-Rims dropped his head into his hands.
Exasperated, he asked, “Can we just ask him if we can look in his wallet?”
“What do you mean?” the DA asked.
“I mean, can a cop just walk up to him, in some public place, and say, ‘Hey, kid, can I look in your wallet?’ ”
“What happens if the kid says no or asks why the cop wants to look in his wallet?”
“Then the cop squints at him and says, ‘Wait, are you …’ and then says some other name and Frank says no and the cop apologizes up and down.”
“Don’t you think that’ll make him suspicious, so maybe he goes home and throws out the stub?”
“If we can’t get it, it’s as good as thrown out anyway. Will it hold up in court?”
The DA was quiet for a minute. He took a deep breath.
“Give me an hour to come up with something better. If I can’t, go with it, but the cop has got to stick to the script. He can’t argue with the kid, he just asks, and if the kid says or does anything but hand over the wallet, the cop gives him the line about looking for somebody else. No convincing the kid. No nothing. Just ask and if the kid says any remote version of no, the cop bails.”
An hour later, the DA gave Horn-Rims the go-ahead.
Horn-Rims prepped a uniformed officer with the script. Set the cop up with a wire. They drove in separate cars to the high school. Horn-Rims and The Man with the Facts parked around the corner. Fifteen minutes later the uniformed cop radioed them.
“He’s got the ticket stub for the night in question.”
“All right, give him a ride to his house,” Horn-Rims responded. “We’ll meet you there.”
The two police cars arrived at the Geyers’. Horn-Rims saw profound fear in Frank’s eyes. Only his mother was home. Horn-Rims and The Man with the Facts arranged themselves with Frank and his mother in the living room. The uniformed cop left. It took half a look for Horn-Rims to know she wasn’t going to break. Not for an instant. And she’d tear his throat out if he got tough.
“Mrs. Geyer, we’re here because we found a ticket stub in your son’s wallet from the nightclub for the night in question. Now, Frank is not an official suspect. We just want to know what he saw and don’t particularly care why he didn’t feel comfortable talking to us in the first place. The important thing is figuring out who murdered Renee. We’re not going to worry if a teenager or two is squeamish about talking to us.”
“And how did you come to find the ticket stub in his wallet?” Mrs. Geyer asked.
“A uniformed officer asked Frank if he could look through Frank’s wallet and Frank said yes. This was outside the high school just now.”
“Is that how it went, Frank?”
Frank nodded. Radiating terror.
“The question was recorded, Mrs. Geyer, if you have any concerns about the exchange.”
“You seem to be spending an awful lot of time on a boy who isn’t an official suspect in the case, detective. If I didn’t have the utmost respect for you, I would assume you were looking to throw someone, anyone, to the clamoring public, whose confidence, by now, has been much diminished by the department’s inability to produce even a primary suspect, let alone make an arrest. Though I can sympathize with your plight, let me be quite clear: you are wasting your time with my son. In fact, let me make this even easier for you: unless you have a warrant, do not bother speaking with my son or any other member of this family. I assure you, you will not be shown in on your next visit.”
Horn-Rims was ready for this. Horn-Rims expected this. If there were incriminating clothes to be burned, they’d been burned early last Sunday morning.
He talked as he stood up and put on his hat.
“Right now, a judge would most likely sentence Frank to some time in juvie followed by a regimen of therapy and counseling and house arrest, and with good behavior and demonstration that he is emotionally and mentally healthy after what had to be an extremely traumatic ordeal, he would most likely be able to start college in about five years. But in three months, he turns eighteen. Sure, the crime was committed when he was a minor, but you know how the public gets when ugly things are done to a pretty girl. Renee was a very pretty girl and very ugly things were done to her. There’s no telling what time he’d get then, especially if he fights it, but there is a good chance it would be a long time, all of it in prison.”
“Get out of my house.”
Horn-Rims tipped his hat as he left.
Horn-Rims was the last person in the office. He’d talked to a few of Frank’s friends. Once he’d told them about the ticket stub, they confirmed that Frank was at the club, but none of them saw him with Renee. They got separated at some point. None of them knew for sure when he left. They didn’t look for him. When he didn’t answer his phone they figured he just went home. He often bailed on them.
; Horn-Rims needed more. A lot more.
No witness. No motive. No murder weapon. No forensic evidence in the alley or on the body.
Nothing.
Something clicked.
The mysterious spark.
Something about the alley. Something caught. Something snagged. Something about the alley. Something that wasn’t a weapon.
What was a weapon? Why the word weapon? How does an object become a “weapon”?
Horn-Rims wanted to pound on his desk. He wanted to pound on his head. He wanted to pound his head on his desk until whatever was rattling around caught the hook in the language center of his brain.
?…!
“The emergency stairs!”
Horn-Rims leaped from his desk. He grabbed his coat and rushed to his car muttering about how much of a fucking idiot he’d been.
There were two exits into the alley from the club. They assumed Renee and her killer had come out through the door on the first floor. The other exit was just a fire exit. But it was at the bottom of a long flight of concrete stairs. The stairs led to a back hallway, where the club’s offices were. If Frank was just being a stupid, bullheaded teenager and got into a tussle with Renee near the stairs, and somehow she fell, the fall would have accounted for all the trauma. No need for a two-by-four or a baseball bat. Just concrete and gravity. And if Frank were just a kid being hormonal and stupid, he could have panicked and started dragging the body out of the club toward the Dumpsters.
And that’s manslaughter, not murder. Of course, it was also trying to destroy evidence and lying to a police officer, but at this point, with so little evidence, best just to forget the second act of the tragedy. Manslaughter was an entirely different negotiation with the parents. All he needed was to place Frank and Renee in that back hallway.
Horn-Rims called The Man with the Facts at home and picked him up on the way to the club. A badge flash at the door and they were in. It was early for the club scene, so it was just the staff inside. The music was already on. And loud.
Horn-Rims went right through the door to the hallway and the offices. Horn-Rims nodded at The Man with the Facts to check out the stairs, and then knocked on the manager’s door.
“Come in, detective,” the manager said.
Horn-Rims walked in, leaving the door slightly ajar. Sat down in an old plush chair across from the desk. The manager was six-foot-two, at least 220 pounds, wore a sharp suit, and had a shiny bald head and a face well-practiced in the art of looking like it should not be fucked with.
“How can I help you, detective?” the night manager said, not bothering to look up from the work he pretended to do.
“Sorry to bother you again, sir.”
“But here you are.”
“I’ve got to ask you again about that night.”
“I’m not entirely sure why I need to tell you that I didn’t see or hear anything,” the manager said. He put his pen down, leaned back in his chair, and looked at Horn-Rims. “Again.”
“Right, I remember your first answer, that the music is too loud for you to hear anything when you’re working back here,” Horn-Rims said.
“That is correct.”
“But the music is on right now. It was on when I walked in. And I’m sitting here. With the door open. And I don’t really hear it.”
“It’s a lot louder when there are people in the club.”
“That’s true. That’s true. But I’ve heard that too. It’s louder, but not ten times louder. And frankly, if I owned this place and I wanted the night manager to make the most of his time at the club, I’d probably invest in some soundproofing.”
“What are you getting at?”
“This hallway is a fire exit. I’m sure you hear shit going on in this hallway every night. I imagine people are always sneaking back here for a grope or a fuck and you learned a long time ago to just ignore whatever you heard. And nobody is going to expect you to be able to hear the exact moment when a grope goes too far.”
The Man with the Facts came in. He sat down in the other chair.
Horn-Rims continued.
“So whatever you heard, ain’t gonna be no skin off your nose. You’re not up for anything, even though you’ve kept it to yourself. Now,” Horn-Rims made eye contact with The Man with the Facts, who gave him a quick nod, “that all changes if forensics finds some of Renee’s blood at the bottom of the stairs and you continue to keep your trap shut.”
Horn-Rims paused. Let the manager give him a hard stare for just a second.
“We prove they were back there, and you didn’t tell us about it, because of some kind of hope that this murder wasn’t really connected to the club, well,” Horn-Rims started a casual gesture with his hand, but ended it with a look that could’ve stopped a train. “But that isn’t even the point. I don’t want to threaten you. We have a dead girl and a traumatized boy. Now, the boy is connected to a lawyer who has advised him to keep his mouth shut, but that was about murder. I think we might be able to get this kid the help he needs if we’re talking about manslaughter. If he and Renee were in this hallway before she died, then we’re talking manslaughter.”
The manager leaned back in his chair and folded his hands together across his stomach. He took a deep breath.
“And there isn’t going to be anything about withholding evidence?” the manager asked, looking down at his hands and then over at the corner of his desk.
“Does it have to be about that?”
The manager’s head dropped.
“I heard a couple of couples back here that night,” he said. “Always do. It’s bad enough that we’re thinking about renovating to put the offices on the first floor, or at least not right in this fucking hallway with the fire exit. One of the couples was definitely older. Way older. One of them could have been the girl and the guy.”
“What time did you hear the younger couple?”
“Around eleven-thirty, I guess. Coulda been ten minutes in either direction around then.”
Horn-Rims looked at The Man with the Facts. A nod.
“That fits with previous testimony.”
Horn-Rims stood up and extended his hand. The manager shook it.
“Thank you very much,” Horn-Rims said. “You’ll hear from us if you’re called upon to testify. And don’t be shocked if a forensic team shows up in the next hour.”
“Sure, sure,” the manager said.
Back in the car, Horn-Rims asked, “Is it worth it to sic forensics on the stairs?”
The Man with the Facts was quiet for a moment. “Yes. Though it is unlikely they will be able to extract DNA evidence, I saw some stains on the mat at the foot of the stairs and on the door that could be blood or other bodily fluid or residue of bodily tissue. They could prove somebody fell down the stairs, even if they could not prove who.”
“Call ’em. Maybe Frank’s prints are on the inside of the door. That could get us the warrant.”
The Man with the Facts called ’em in. Horn-Rims started driving.
“I’ll swing you by your place on the way back to the station.”
“Thank you, HR.”
“And if you end up with a sleepless night tonight, spend it figuring out what to do if we don’t find his fingerprints on the door.”
“I’ll add it to the schedule.”
“Because if we don’t get those prints, we might not get the warrant, and we might not get any further.”
“Will also add a block of time for irrationally hoping for the best,” The Man with the Facts said.
Horn-Rims gunned it to get through a yellow light.
“Yeah, let me know how that feels.”
Horn-Rims sat at his desk, going through the eyewitness testimony of a shooting murder. For the most part, it looked like your basic domestic abuse gone wrong, but there were a few things about the scene that didn’t jibe. The victim was all the way on the other side of the room facing the shooter. These kinds of shootings almost always take place at close range and when
they were at a greater distance the victim was always shot in the back as he or she was running away from the confrontation. Horn-Rims picked up a cup of cold coffee off the corner of his desk. Wondered if there was money hiding somewhere. Before he could take a sip, another detective rushed up to his desk.
“Frank Geyer’s fingerprints were on the inside of the door,” she said.
Horn-Rims gave the detective a curt nod. In eight minutes, he was at the Geyers’.
He knocked on their door. Mrs. Geyer answered.
“I believe the last time we spoke, you were told that we would not speak to you again without a warrant.”
“That is true, Mrs. Geyer, but we were talking about a murder case then. That’s not what we’re talking about now.”
“Oh? Are you recruiting for a book club, detective?” she said with vicious sarcasm. “Or perhaps some kind of debate society where we discuss the nature of facts? Or why not just talk about the weather? That’s what strangers do, after all.”
“Manslaughter, Mrs. Geyer. New evidence has changed this from homicide to manslaughter.”
Horn-Rims saw Frank walk by inside.
“We know Renee fell down the stairs, Frank,” he shouted.
Frank stopped. Wide-eyed. Looked at his mother.
“We know it was an accident, Frank,” Horn-Rims said much quieter.
“Frankie, go to your room. Now.”
Frank dashed upstairs. Mrs. Geyer stepped out onto the stoop. Horn-Rims stepped back to accommodate her. She closed the door behind her.
“Now what the hell are you talking about?” she demanded.
“I don’t know what your son told you, but this is what we’ve figured out. Frank was at the club that night. He bumped into Renee after she went to the bathroom. That was when the waitress saw them together. They decided to go make out in the hallway where the offices are. The night manager heard them, but people are always making out back there, so he didn’t do or say anything about it. Your son went a little too far. You know how teenage boys, even good teenage boys, can be. Whatever happened next resulted in a struggle. Who knows, maybe Renee flipped out and Frank had to defend himself. Maybe he didn’t know his own strength, or just lost track of where they were in the hallway. Maybe she wasn’t used to the heels she was wearing. Whatever it was, Renee fell down a two-story flight of concrete stairs. Frank panicked. He tried to hide the body by dragging it out to the Dumpster. Something made him drop it before he got there. Maybe a car drove by or his arms got tired. It doesn’t matter. Now, maybe the clothes he wore that night have been cleaned or burned and maybe they haven’t. Maybe there’s something on his shoes or his belt. Maybe this whole thing would’ve been over if it hadn’t rained that night.”