Want To Play (Monkeewrench) m-1

by P. J. Tracy

  Frustrated and melancholy, Magozzi had finally given up for the night and gone home to his modest stucco on the edge of uptown Minneapolis. He ate a microwave dinner, sorted his mail, then escaped up a rickety second-floor ladder into his attic studio to paint.

  Before the divorce, he’d painted in the garage, slapping mosquitoes in the summer and standing in a circle of space heaters in the winter that doubled their electric bill. The day Heather moved out, taking her aversion to turpentine and chemical sensitivity to anything she didn’t buy at the Lancôme counter with her, he’d dragged all the paraphernalia inside and set up in the living room. For two months he painted there, just because he could, and only hauled everything up to the attic when his Froot Loops started to taste like mineral spirits.

  He took a deep, calming breath as he popped up through the hatch, savoring the warm tang of turpentine and oil paints that saturated the air. Now this was real aromatherapy.

  It was almost two o’clock in the morning by the time he washed his brushes and crawled into bed, exhausted. The fall landscape was still just blocks of color, a mess really; but it would shape up nicely, he thought as he drifted off to sleep.

  The bedside phone shrilled him awake at a little after four. For a millisecond, he fantasized about drawing his 9mm and silencing the phone forever, but the fantasy dissolved and he reached for the receiver, wondering if at any time in the history of the telecommunicating world had an early-morning phone call brought good news. He doubted it. Good news could always wait, but for some reason, bad news never could. ‘Magozzi here.’

  ‘Get your ass over to Lakewood Cemetery, Leo,’ Gino said over the phone. ‘We got a real sparkler this time. BCA’s on their way.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Shit is right, my friend.’

  Magozzi moaned, tossing his warm covers aside and cringing at the rush of frigid air he hoped would shock him into consciousness. ‘Why the hell do you sound like you’ve been up for an hour already?’

  ‘Whaddaya think? I been up half the night with the Accident.’ He was talking about his six-month-old son, a surprise arrival thirteen years after the last one.

  Magozzi let out a long-suffering sigh. ‘You got coffee?’

  ‘I got coffee – my sainted wife is loading up the thermos as we speak. And bring your parka. It’s frigging freezing.’

  Half an hour later, Magozzi and Gino were standing in Lakewood Cemetery, staring up in shocked silence at an enormous stone statue of an angel with massive wings extended. A dead girl was draped over one wing, arms and legs dangling on either side, her face partially obscured by a curtain of blood-stained blond hair. She wore a red dress, net nylons, and stiletto heels.

  Crime scene had set up bright white lights on tall aluminum tripods to illuminate the gruesome tableau and the whole effect was surreal. Magozzi couldn’t quite shake the feeling that he’d been transported to the set of a Kubrick film. Or a B horror flick.

  He looked over at a row of crumbling grave markers backlit by the kliegs and saw little tendrils of mist curling on the ground around them.

  He blinked a couple times, trying to dispel the image. Then he realized that it was real fog, and sometimes in real cemeteries, real fog crept along the ground the same way it did in the movies.

  Gino took a gulp of coffee. ‘Christ. This looks like some cult bullshit to me.’

  Jimmy Grimm from BCA forensics was making a meticulous circuit around the pedestal of the grave marker, tweezing up minuscule pieces of evidence and bagging them.

  Anantanand Rambachan stood off to one side, waiting for Jimmy to finish. He gave the detectives a melancholy nod. No banter this morning.

  Magozzi looked back up at the body. ‘She’s young,’ he said quietly. ‘Just a kid.’

  Gino took a closer look. Not much older than Helen, he thought, then pushed that thought right out of his mind. His fourteen-year-old daughter didn’t belong in the same mind where images of dead girls were floating. ‘Christ,’ he muttered again.

  Magozzi moved in a little closer, examining the dark drip marks down the angel’s side. ‘Who found her?’

  Grateful for the distraction, Gino nodded toward a pair of bedraggled-looking college boys wearing U of M letter jackets. A uniform was interviewing the lanky, blond one while the shorter, dark kid dry-heaved on his hands and knees.

  Magozzi clucked his tongue, genuinely sorry for the kids. How many years would it take before the nightmares stopped for them? Maybe never. ‘Let’s go talk to them so we can send the poor bastards home.’

  As they approached, the officer turned and gave them a grateful look. ‘They’re all yours.’ He leaned forward and spoke confidentially. ‘You want some advice? Talk to the blond kid, name’s Jeff Rasmussen. The other one’s still drunk as a skunk and as you might have noticed, he pukes every time you ask him a question.’

  Gino moved in on Jeff Rasmussen, while Magozzi hung back and watched. Sometimes body language told a better story than words.

  Jeff bobbed his head up and down nervously when Gino introduced himself. He had glittery, pale blue eyes shot through with red that kept darting toward the statue. His friend looked up miserably and tried to focus without much success.

  ‘You want to tell us what happened, Jeff?’

  Jeff bobbed his head again. ‘Sure. Sure. Yeah.’ Very nervous. Very wired. ‘We were at the hockey game . . . then after, we went out for a couple drinks . . . they have three-for-ones at Chelsea’s on Mondays. So we stayed until bar close – we were a little lit, you know? Hitched a ride with a friend – he had a twelve-pack in the trunk – so we drove around and told him to stop here. He chickened out, but he gave us a couple beers and . . . well . . .’ He paused and his face flushed bright red. ‘Is that trespassing?’

  Gino nodded.

  Jeff seemed to fold in on himself. ‘Jesus, my parents’ll kill me . . .’

  ‘Let’s not worry about the trespassing now, Jeff. At least you weren’t driving drunk.’

  ‘No, no! I’d never do that, I don’t even have a car . . .’

  Gino cleared his throat impatiently. ‘Tell me what you saw when you got here.’

  Jeff swallowed hard. ‘Well . . . we didn’t see anything. It was empty, you know? Late. So we walked around for a while, looking for the Angel so we could do the Dare.’

  ‘What dare?’

  ‘The Angel of Death Dare.’ His eyes shifted back and forth between the two detectives. ‘You know . . . the Dare?’

  Gino and Magozzi both shook their heads.

  ‘Oh. Well, there’s this ghost story, legend, whatever. Says this guy buried here was some dark priest or something for a Satanic cult. He bought the angel for his grave marker and told his followers that he’d put a curse on it – if you held the angel’s hands and looked into her face, you’d see the way you would die.’

  Magozzi turned and looked up at the blank, stone eyes of the angel, then at the dead girl’s limp form, wondering if she’d looked into the angel’s eyes before she died.

  ‘Anyhow,’ Jeff continued, ‘we found the angel . . . at first we thought it was a joke or something. Like a doll? It was just too weird, I mean, this is Minneapolis, right? But then we saw the blood and then . . . well, Kurt.’ He jabbed a thumb in the puking kid’s direction. ‘Kurt had a cell phone and we called you guys.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  Jeff looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘Yeah. That’s it.’

  ‘You didn’t see anything? Didn’t hear anything?’

  ‘Nope. Just a bunch of tombstones. There was nobody else here.’ His eyes wandered to the body again.

  ‘So it was just you two in the cemetery, you’re sure about that?’

  Jeff looked at Gino again, and his eyes sprang wide in panic. ‘Jesus, you don’t think . . . oh shit, you don’t think we did this, do you?’

  Gino pulled out a card and handed it to the kid. ‘You think of anything else, you call this number, okay?’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah.’


  Magozzi and Gino walked back to the statue in silence. Rambachan was up there with the girl now, but Jimmy Grimm was walking toward them, his round, ruddy face solemn. ‘Didn’t get shit, guys,’ he said in a gloomy voice. ‘A couple hairs, probably the vic’s, couple bags of trace from the surrounding area, just for good measure, even though they’re contaminated as hell. No personal effects. Rambachan says it’s another .22.’

  ‘Too goddamned many of those on the street,’ Gino muttered.

  ‘Tell me about it.’ Jimmy chewed on his lower lip while he pondered the scene before him. ‘It’s very clean, guys. Almost looks like a pro job, but then this girl is most likely a hooker, and who’s gonna spend the money to hit a hooker? Weirdest goddamn thing I’ve seen in twenty years and I’ve seen it all. You want her down yet, Anant?’

  Rambachan was crouched on the pedestal, peering into the girl’s upside-down face with a high-intensity penlight. ‘A moment, please, Mr Grimm.’

  Jimmy shook his head. ‘A year I been working with that guy, and he still calls me Mr Grimm. Makes me feel like a fairy tale.’

  ‘Maybe she knew something. Maybe posing her on the statue was a warning,’ Gino said.

  ‘Oh, I think she posed herself on the statue before she was shot,’ Jimmy said. ‘Which is even weirder. Check out the blood splatters. You got drip marks down the statue’s side and a whole lotta daisy-shaped blood splatters on the pedestal, a “crown” effect. Perpendicular impact, high height, high velocity. Which meant that she was probably already on top of the statue when she was shot. If she’d been killed somewhere else and hauled up there, there’d be different kinds of splatters and they wouldn’t be so consistent. And maybe not as much blood, depending on how long she’d been dead. God, I hate this job. I’m gonna take early retirement and start day-trading or something.’

  ‘We’re all just janitors,’ Gino mumbled. ‘Cleaning up somebody else’s messes.’

  ‘They don’t call me “The Grimm Reaper” for nothing,’ Jimmy said cheerlessly.

  11

  Mitch had made breakfast, his marital equivalent of half a dozen Hail Marys. He started plating the food when he heard the back door open and close.

  ‘What’s this?’ Diane breezed into the kitchen on a current of fresh air. Her cheeks were pink from her morning run, her blond ponytail damp when she pulled back the Gore-Tex hood. She looked like an ad for a health club.

  He smiled at her. ‘Penance.’

  ‘I didn’t even hear you come in last night.’

  ‘I slept in the den. It was very late. I didn’t want to wake you.’

  ‘Hmm.’ She was trotting in place to cool off, running shoes squeaking on the tile. ‘Do I have time for a shower?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  He carried the plates through the dining room he preferred, out to the glass sun porch, Diane’s favorite room in the house. It was a large space made small by a jungle of ferns and palms and flowering plants that all looked healthier than he felt. The air was heavy and humid and smelled of damp earth. Mitch hated that smell.

  ‘Oh, this is lovely, Mitchell.’ Diane settled at the wrought-iron table and admired her plate. A spinach omelet in fluted puff pastry, iced pears with grated Reggiano, a single fanned strawberry. ‘You must have done something truly awful. Are we going to have sex, too?’

  He must have looked startled, because she smiled a little as she tucked a pear into her mouth and held out her cup. ‘Half, please.’

  ‘How’s the new painting coming along?’

  ‘Badly. If I don’t have any luck today, I may pull it from the show.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. It’s not your fault, now is it? And one painting more or less isn’t going to make any difference to the gallery. This is really extraordinary. Nutmeg?’

  ‘Right.’ He laid his fork upside down on the edge of his plate, cue to a nonexistent waiter. He wasn’t hungry at all; still a little off-balance from her sex remark.

  ‘I can’t place the cheese.’

  ‘Five cheeses, actually.’

  Silver scraped china as she chased down the last bite of her omelet. ‘You are so good at this. You really should come out of the closet and cook for your friends.’

  His cup clattered into the saucer. ‘Why do you do that?’

  She looked up, all innocence. ‘Do what?’

  ‘Call them my friends. They’re our friends, not just mine.’

  ‘Oh. Did I say that? I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just that you spend so much more time with them . . .’ Her voice and gaze drifted until she focused on his plate. ‘You aren’t going to let that go to waste, are you?’

  He stared at her for a moment, almost irritated enough to pursue the issue if it weren’t so damn hot in this room; so damn close. When she glanced at his face, her own crumpled instantly. My God. What had he looked like? What had she seen?

  ‘Please,’ he said quickly. ‘Help yourself. I ate while I was cooking.’ He wanted to run, out of the room, out of the house, but he made himself sit there and smile until her mouth curved in a tentative answer, and then he watched in silence as she polished off both breakfasts. It was amazing, really. She had an almost frightening appetite, and yet remained in perfect physical condition, never gaining or losing a single pound.

  Use that. Give her something. You owe her that much.

  ‘I don’t know how you do it, Diane.’ He added another smile for good measure. ‘If I told Annie what you ate this morning she’d have you killed.’

  She laughed out loud, almost frightening him. She never did that. ‘Maybe Annie should start running. You all should, for that matter. It’s not healthy being cooped up in that loft all day, just sitting in front of those silly computer screens.’

  ‘We take an occasional break. Roadrunner bikes and does his yoga, Grace lifts weights . . .’

  ‘Does she? I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Maybe that’s because you hardly see her anymore.’

  ‘I try to keep in touch. I called her the minute the show was over in Los Angeles, didn’t I? We had a wonderful chat.’

  ‘So call her more often. Come into the city for lunch. She’d love that.’

  ‘You’re right. That’s precisely what I should do, right after this show is over.’ She sipped at her coffee and opened the newspaper he’d left neatly folded to the left of her place. ‘Hmm. Market took a tumble yesterday.’

  Mitch pushed back his chair. Time to leave.

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I certainly don’t need to read that sort of thing with my morning coffee.’

  ‘What sort of thing?’

  She passed him the paper with a disgusted flick of her wrist. ‘There simply are no good newspapers anymore. They’re all like tabloids, reporting every single grisly detail . . .’

  She may have continued talking, but if so, Mitch didn’t hear her. He’d started to read the article that had dared to offend, eyes darting back and forth, then freezing suddenly while all the blood drained from his face.

  ‘It’s horrible, isn’t it?’

  He blinked at her, confused for a moment, then remembered to nod. ‘Yes. Horrible.’

  ‘Well, I’m off to the shower.’ She popped out of her chair and paused long enough to kiss the top of his head. ‘Thanks for the breakfast, darling. It was wonderful.’

  Mitch refolded the paper carefully, running a thumbnail along the crease. ‘My pleasure,’ he murmured, but by that time, Diane was already in the shower.

  12

  The Monkeewrench loft space was cavernous and silent, still asleep like most of the city. The sun was just beginning to creep over the eastern horizon and its weak light struggled to penetrate the bank of windows on the far wall.

  In the dark maze of desks in the center of the room, a computer monitor hissed to life – an eerie blue window glowing brightly in the gloom. Slowly, letter by letter, red pixels coalesced on the screen and a me
ssage materialized:

  WANT TO PLAY A GAME?

  Down on the ground floor, the freight elevator rumbled and groaned, then wheezed to a stop at the loft. Roadrunner emerged, walked over to the computer monitor, read the message, and frowned. He tapped a few keys, but the message remained and his frown deepened. He tapped a few more keys, then shrugged and headed for the coffeemakers.

  As he started grinding beans, he gazed out the windows at the awakening city below. In the distance the Mississippi River flowed sluggishly, as if it were practicing for its winter hibernation in ice, and even the first wave of commuters was moving more slowly on this frosty morning. Winter was a state of mind in Minneapolis, and it always started long before the first snows flew.

  He began the meticulous work of leveling tablespoons of fresh coffee and carefully depositing them into a new filter. He was so intent, so focused on his chore that he never saw the massive figure creeping silently, stealthily, toward him through the shadows.

  ‘BEEP, BEEP!’

  Roadrunner twitched convulsively and sent coffee grounds flying. ‘God damnit, Harley, that was Jamaican Blue!’

  ‘Heads up, little buddy.’ Harley shrugged off his battered leather bike jacket and tossed it on the back of his chair.

  Roadrunner started scooping up coffee grounds with angry sweeping motions. ‘Where the hell were you, anyhow? I thought the place was empty.’

  ‘I was taking a leak. And you gotta loosen up a little. You got a spooky little ritualistic thing going on with that coffeemaker. Every time you get within five feet of it, you enter a fugue state. It worries me.’ He glanced over at the monitor where the red message still glowed. ‘You working on Grace’s computer?’