Quintic

by V. P. Trick

  On a subsequent conversation, the motel manager would finally remember this if nothing else. “Your guy took a room the Sunday before the murder. Paid cash. Asked for matches.”

  The other booklet had the logo of a strip club in the same neighbourhood as the club Patricia had taken Chris.

  “The green and I’ll go and check it out after we’re done here boss,” Ham volunteered.

  Chris went home, stopping on the way for two bottles of scotch. He made a start on the first bottle while waiting for his food delivery. Had more with his food, and then polished off the bottle watching football. Damning his ability to drink without getting drunk. Training, desensitisation from his reckless twenties. He had been a bum, a biker, a doorman and a loose cannon. His cop life might give him an appearance of respectability but a facade it was; some things never changed. He opened the other bottle watching a boxing tournament. Maybe his eyes got smaller, but his stride remained straight, his hands steady and his thoughts clear if somewhat slower.

  Hitting the jerks at the club might have taken a bit of the edge off, but given in to the rage made him feel hollow. For Chris, control was safer. He dipped into the second half of the bottle in front of an X-rated flick. Lame. Who wanted a woman that just stayed flat on her back doing what she was told? Fucking lame. He liked spunk. Feisty. Brainy. Unpredictable. He fell asleep in front of the screen.

  The next day, he headed to the office early. He had nothing else to do except work on the cases. Since he was in a shitty mood, the weather suited him fine. He reviewed all of the team’s cases, including Lemieux’s, especially Lemieux’s, nursing his anger. They had shit to go on, only clothes and dry food, generic brands, nothing fancy, all untraceable except for the matchbooks. Their new fucking leads? Hair samples, partial fingerprints, so far, all from Lemieux as per the lab guys.

  The guy had kept his car clean. If he had been living in his car, sleeping in it, he had been doing it alone. The lab guys had yet to find something of the hooker. The leg work, he let to the guys.

  It had rained all day Saturday. It rained all day Sunday. Chris didn’t call Patricia; she didn’t call him either. He gave explicit instructions to prevent her from seeing Lemieux’s car. Not that she came near the precinct.

  Patricia on Rainy Days

  Patricia stayed in all weekend. Hard to go anywhere with bruised feet. Blisters gathered in the motel’s neighbourhood. Cuts and nicks from her stroll barefoot at Christopher’s arm, damn him.

  She dedicated her days to housecleaning. No, she didn’t have a house and yes, every week the chambermaid did a bout of cleaning. Nonetheless, she emptied her closets and went through her belongings, discarding worn or unwanted clothes.

  Her walk-in was half-empty. She had not taken the time to go shopping lately, what with the murder thing and all. And she didn’t have the temperament of a collector, so clothes she didn’t keep long enough to accumulate. Her only keepsakes (mementos, book ideas written on menus, scraps of papers or napkins) she kept pêle-mêle in a stack of hat boxes in her bedroom. She didn’t touch her boxes in her cleaning spree, only what she considered her non-valuables such as clothes, jewellery, shoes, makeup.

  She emptied a third of her already half-empty closet. She gave most of the items to the hotel staff as usual, and the rest to charity. She ate healthy meals in the hotel’s kitchen, salads mostly, without wine or coffee.

  By Sunday night, she was feeling better. Clearly she had to make it up to Christopher in some way, but she was not ready yet. She too was angry. Why did they stay such an awfully long time in that strip club? Had he liked the show?

  And he had made her walk barefoot.

  And he had sent her home alone.

  And she hadn’t wanted to talk about Lemieux in the first place. And− Damn him!

  Came Monday morning, she set her alarm indecently early. Kicking off the week with a premature rise would set the mood, she hoped, for work, work, work exclusively on her book this week. She was sooo not in the mood for the precinct and its inhabitants. She would devote her time to writing and writing only.

  The rain hadn’t stopped, but the downpour didn’t affect her spirit. She jumped into the shower quickly, dressed in an all-weather outfit, forewent makeup and combing. A hairdo was a hopeless cause in that kind of weather. Her hair was going to do whatever the heck it wanted to, no matter the amount of gel or mousse or hair spray. On the way down, she paused in the hotel kitchen for a sandwich, and off she was to her French coffee shop for a seven o’clock start.

  She worked until her stomach growled for mercy. She successfully ignored it another half hour. By ten-thirty, she was starving, and craving for a club sandwich. Fresh lettuce. Sun-ripened tomatoes. A bit of chicken. Lots of bacon. A brisk walk will do me wonder after sitting all morning.

  She headed for the diner. The rain had turned into a light drizzle during her hours of writing, but it picked up during her walk. She was still a good five blocks away from the diner, but the hail had already soaked through her clothes. She backtracked her steps to the small local restaurant she had seen on the side street a block down. That joint would have to do for today.

  “Are you open yet?” She asked the waitresses and the empty room.

  “Yes, ma’am. It’s only eleven. On Mondays, the lunch crowd doesn’t come by until eleven-thirty quarter to twelve.”

  “Great! I’ll have the place almost to myself.” She picked a table near the window.

  “What you’ll have, honey?”

  “I’d like a club sandwich, easy on the Mayo, with French fries.”

  “Coffee with that, hon’?”

  “No, thanks.” The place was warm enough.

  Her club was delicious, and she ate her fries down to the last one, studying the diner in between blissful bites. The layout resembled her cold case restaurant with its dozen greyish square tables, seating two or four, and two large windows on each side of the front door. Here too the kitchen was visible through a cut-out opening at the back, and the toilets were located on the left of the kitchen window. The only noticeable difference was in the sitting counter her case diner had that this place lacked. Even the two-waitress two-cook staff looked similar enough to pass for cousins of the other diner’s employees; their expressions simultaneously looked tired, bored and busy.

  The rain stopped around noon. As Patricia walked out, she noticed a narrow alley to the right of the diner building. With the rain beating down in her eyes, she had not seen it coming in. Interesting. Did this place have a back alley also? She found her cold case alley challenging, short of interesting details. Its two unexciting containers did not provide enough hiding for a lurking killer.

  Behind the diner, the side alley crossed a short back alley that went two doors to the left and one door the right, a T-shaped dead end. Doors on the left were for apartment buildings, garage accesses only, no outdoor parking lots, no fire escapes. A definite improvement for her cold case, though, because the apartment buildings provided shades and shadows. She took pictures with her mobile phone until the rain picked up again.

  She had only a couple more pictures she wanted to take, the back door, trash container and such. Then, she planned on first, going home to change into something sexy before, second, surprising Christopher for coffee, baring a freshly made double espresso from Vitto’s coffee shop, and third, wing it from there depending on the Big guy’s mood. For sure he was going to be angry but hopefully, not too angry.

  Damn, she had missed him this weekend. Exhausting herself with cleaning was no substitute for curling up next to him under the covers. They could have watched a film or a sports game. She liked watching him watch sports on television. They could have talked. Make love. Damn pride. She derisively smirked at the thought, although not sure whose pride, hers or his, she was thinking of. Hers probably this time.

  She went on taking pictures: the diner’s back wall, its windowless back door, another building’s back wall, a third building’s back wall, all grey stucc
o, a small (albeit almost her height) trash container in the corner against the two walls. Quite a challenge for the waste truck driver, this little back T-alley. The alley was that narrow, if a truck rode in now, she wouldn’t have any room to retreat to on the side.

  Due to the T-shape configuration, the driver would have to, first, turn left, hugging the apartment buildings, then drive up in reverse to the right end of the back alley to reach the container. Then, since the small tank sat in the corner, the driver would need to get out of his truck and rolled the container to the middle of the alley to align it with his truck’s bin. Unless the truck had a side shifter?

  She tried rolling the container by hand. The metal box was very heavy, and its wheels weren’t new, probably they weren’t perfectly round either. Tugging and pulling, her grip on its side handle, she struggled to position the container to the wall, centring it perfectly. There. The next time the trash driver drove back, he wouldn’t have to get out. She smiled at her good deed for the day. Time to go.

  As she was leaving, a forgotten trash bag caught her attention from the corner. Previously wedged between the container and the wall, her back alley ‘home staging’ had brought it out of hiding. A heavy-looking black plastic bag with some yellowish straw on top.

  The rain fell in her eyes, blurring the bag’s details; she took a step forward without thinking. Instinct. She had known what it was even before she saw it clearly. She was getting too good at this, wasn’t she, too damn, désespérément proficient? The size, the shape, the straw. She stood staring at the sack for a long time.

  Sheltering Patricia

  It wasn’t a bag at all. A raincoat maybe? Those shiny plastic ones college students wore these days. She poked the bag with the hesitant tip of a shoe when it suddenly occurred to her that the body might not be dead. She leapt and yanked the hunched shape, twisting it to see the face, the neck. No pulse.

  The girl had been pretty. Her eyes were still open, big and green, a little sad. The rain had plastered her hair to her skull and soaked through her clothes. She had been sitting head bent with her arms around her knees. Had she died all curled up like that, hiding behind the container, or had someone put her there? Left her there, alone in a back alley in the rain. Like the diner girl. She looked so wet; she must have been so cold. So, so cold.

  Patricia ached for the girl; she needed her out of the rain. Half-lifting, half-dragging, being as gentle as she could, holding the garbage girl by the armpits, Patricia inched nearer to the diner’s back door, and, once close enough, knocked on the door, pounding with both fists, and screaming, “Open up! Open the damn door. Please.” Over and over.

  The door finally opened. A cook blocked the doorframe, an angry scowl on his face and a sharp knife in his hand. Had the girl been stabbed? Patricia’s brain froze.

  The cook’s eyes went to Patricia, standing in the rain, her hair all frizzled and her wet coat moulding her breasts. His eyes lingered on her chest before dropping to her jeans, her hips, her legs. To the shape leaning on her leg.

  He moved to the body. Patricia stayed rooted to her spot by the door. He put his arms under the girl, cradling her on his chest, carried her body inside. He deposited his load on the kitchen floor.

  Except for the unblinking eyes, the girl might have been asleep. The cook came back for Patricia, fisting her elbow and steering her inside. Patricia saw his lips moved. Was he speaking to her or the body on the floor? Neither of them answered. He wrenched the phone from the wall and dialled, talked and waited, talked again and waited, the other cook now standing next to the body, patting it dry with paper napkins while the waitresses observed through the back window in stunned silence.

  Patricia saw them all, but she did not move. She stood, her mind a blank. She was freezing. Her mind was reeling. I have to do something. Yes, but what? The little voice in her mind nagged her. You found another one. Damn it. You found another one.

  She was a writer, she wrote fiction, that was her thing. Not journalism. Not police work. Just research and writing and storytelling. No dead body. She didn’t like dead bodies. She could kill anybody in a book but not in the real life. In real life, she wanted normal like everybody had. She yearned for normal, damn it! Without a dead, murdered body in it. Why did I go into that alley? I have to leave. I can’t go through another murder investigation. Not now. Still, she couldn’t move.

  The cook came to talk to her. She nodded. What was he saying, she had no clue, couldn’t hear a thing. Someone brought her a chair. The police arrived. Two patrolmen. Then an ambulance. Then two more policemen. Some detectives. She was shivering steadily. Someone put a blanket on her shoulders. She was quivering. Was this what going into shock felt like?

  The detectives came to talk to her. She didn’t know them. She tried to answer their questions. She tried explaining why she had been in the T-shaped alley. They looked at her like she was crazy. Stupid cops.

  She didn’t like policemen. Cops always made things complicated. Her story was easy enough to understand. “One last time gentlemen. I’ll talk slowly. I ate a club sandwich. I walked out back to take pictures. I’m doing research for a book. I’m doing research for a female private investigator. I moved the container for the garbage truck driver. I found a large garbage bag−”

  One cop or another interrupted with nonsense about a PI permit and the truck driver’s name. One or another wanted to know what she had seen. “Have you witnessed the murder?”

  “No, I have not seen anything.” She repeated the chain of events.

  One cop or another asked stupid questions.

  “No, I did not touch anything.”

  One stupid cop or another asked stupid questions.

  “No, I have not moved anything. Well, except the girl, of course, she was cold−” She breathed through her nostrils. “Not me, stupid. The girl! Just like the other girl−”

  “The dead one in the back alley at the diner−”

  “You think you guys will let me finish a sentence at some point? The other diner−”

  Damn those cops were dumb. “Perhaps one of your colleagues has a brain?”

  Mondays Are MacLaren’s Worst

  On Monday, big surprise, Chris was back at the office early. His men came in one by one. Shapiro punched in after a family weekend, lunch box full of pasta, like always. Chris would have appreciated a home-cooked pasta dish at the Shapiros this weekend. If he had called, the Shapiros would have welcomed him with open arms. They had had supper there a few weeks ago, Patricia and him. Colleagues having dinner together my ass.

  They weren’t pretending anymore, so he had brought Patricia over with him and had taken her to his place afterwards. They had to make their relationship more official soon. Maybe he should propose. For real, Princess. The crooked grin appeared, the first one in three days. He would stun Patricia with such a proposal. No doubt she would turn him down rudely. The crooked smile grew bigger. When he finally dropped his knee and proposed, he was going to make sure she couldn’t say no. Not that she could technically, right? Since they were already married, not engaged, though, but still legally married. The smile turned into a wolfish grin.

  Charles walked in right after Shapiro. The new guy was trying to impress the boss and the other guys. Chris hadn’t made up his mind about the rookie yet. Charles did work hard, but he was a little too by-the-book and lacked initiative. Not that it was necessarily a bad thing for it balanced off some of Ham’s blunt edge. Teaming those two proved a good test for the new copper.

  Since Hamilton, for one, wouldn’t be in before nine-thirty ten, barely making it to the team’s weekly meeting, Chris would get to see a little of how Charles worked when left to himself.

  Reid came in at eight, regular as a clock, closely followed by LeRoy. Chris wondered for the nth time if those two had an affair going. It was obvious to him Reid liked LeRoy, and that LeRoy liked Reid. But with his three marriages that hadn’t lasted more than six months each and his endless string of live-in mistr
esses, LeRoy was not in a romantic mood these days. This year.

  Chris sighed. If those two ever dated, official procedures demanded he transferred one of them. Which would bring forth a credibility issue because of Patricia. Although, technically, the damn woman wasn’t working for him. Archives officially had her on their payroll (her pay was not worth a shit compared to what she was making as a writer) as a temp filing clerk. Damndest woman.

  Fuck, he had missed her this weekend. A little softness would have improved his mood drastically. He longed for her laughs, her smell, her breathing next to him; he even missed her off-the-wall ideas except if about trips to strip clubs That visit had been a disaster. That he had not been able to figure out what had possessed her to bring him there didn’t help with his anger management. That Lemieux thing was getting to her.

  Leaning on his office door frame, he studied his team as they settled for work, coffee cup in hand. He had stopped counting, but it was probably his fifth (huge) mug of the morning. The team teased one another, read emails, made calls and teased some more. Bridget had been in at seven per her usual. She still looked tired, her cold not completely gone but was busy answering the phones (without using the pad), doing follow-ups for the guys with her usual efficiency.

  DesForges and Frankke clomped in together. The guys had taken into starting the week with breakfast at a restaurant a couple of blocks off. Good food, good service they said. Good waitresses Chris suspected. Both guys were incorrigible bachelors, a bit screwed-up but reliable. Those guys had his back. Whatever the situation, they could handle it, and had many times before. Like the rest of them. His team, a damn fine team. Quartet leftovers excluded, he had picked each individually. Great choices.