Exceptional Clearance

by William Caunitz

  The desk lieutenant nodded and continued making his blotter entry. The second-floor squadroom was a collection of old desks and old typewriters scattered around a spacious room with a detention cage cut into the east wall. The three detectives who were typing reports ignored the man standing by himself in the middle of the room. He was dressed in a white running suit, and wore white sneakers and white cotton gloves, and was spraying himself with something that smelled like disinfectant.

  Reaching over the wooden gate to release the latch, Moose Ryan said, “Joe McMahon?”

  A heavyset detective looked up from his typewriter. “I’m McMahon.”

  “I’m Tony Marsella, and this here is Moose Ryan. We’re the guys who inherited the Thelma Johnston homicide.”

  “You are, hmm?” McMahon said, going back to his report. “I’ll be with you in a second. I wanna finish off this Five.”

  Ryan looked over his shoulder at the man with the spray can. “Who’s your friend?”

  “The Lysol Man,” McMahon said, as he typed. “He lives on Pacific Street and comes in here every morning and evening to disinfect himself.” He pulled the report out of the typewriter, signed it, and tossed it into the opened case folder on his desk. “Another crime brilliantly solved.” He looked at Moose. “You guys from SID?”

  “Yeah,” Moose said.

  McMahon sat back, lacing his hands across his rather ample stomach. “Why the hell is the Special Investigation Division interested in a homicide in my backyard? We’re the raggedy-ass part of Park Slope.”

  Marsella improvised quickly. “Word is that someone on the Fourteenth Floor got it into his head that the killing might be racially motivated and wants the investigation run out of the Big Building.”

  “Bullshit. There was nothing racial about that homicide. She was probably whacked by some crackhead looking for buy money.”

  “We still gotta go through the motions,” Marsella said, watching the Lysol Man spray his crotch.

  “Any physical evidence to indicate an attempted robbery?” Moose asked.

  “Nothing. People around here don’t carry much money with them.” McMahon’s attention was momentarily diverted by a 10:10 Shots-Fired alarm coming over the radio. “Like I told you, some crackhead tried to take her off, she resisted, and he Roto-Rootered her neck with some instrument.”

  “Anything on the murder weapon?” Marsella asked the squad detective.

  “Nothing. Emergency Service searched the entire area, sewers, under cars, garbage cans, they even sifted the snow, and came up dry.” McMahon went into the details of the preliminary investigation conducted at the scene.

  The Lysol Man sauntered out of the squadroom, spraying the air in front of him.

  “Our canvass failed to come up with any witnesses,” McMahon said, getting up out of his seat and going over to the window. He shoved it open from the bottom; a blast of cold air swept across the squadroom. “We psychoed that guy a dozen times, but the shrinks always release him the same day. Now we let him do his number and he leaves.”

  “Did you form any impressions at the scene?” Marsella asked.

  McMahon walked over to the five-drawer file cabinet and opened the middle one. He flipped through several folders and yanked one out. Opening it, he took out the crime-scene photos on the Thelma Johnston homicide, and studied them for several minutes. Then he closed the folder, dropped it back into the drawer, and walked back to his desk.

  He sat, leaning forward, intense, and said in a quiet voice, “I’ve never seen a wound like that. And there were a couple of other things about the scene that bothered me. It had stopped snowing, and we were able to track her footprints to the spot where she was grabbed. Her left foot was clearly visible in the snow, and then nothing. She must have been hauled up off her feet in midstride. She weighed a hundred and thirty pounds and had several layers of clothing on. The doer hadda be one strong bastard. I figure he was hiding in the shadows on the side of the stoop. The brownstone’s owner had just shoveled that area, so there weren’t any footprints there.”

  “Did the people inside the brownstone see or hear anything?” Moose Ryan asked.

  “Nothing. They’re in their sixties, and have lived there for over forty years. The husband had all he could do to shovel that little area around the stoop.” McMahon looked Marsella in the eye. “We don’t have a clear picture of where this guy got to after he killed the woman.”

  “Maybe he fled into the building,” Moose Ryan said.

  “We checked that out,” McMahon said. “The couple have turned that brownstone into a fortress. All the windows are barred, and the doors bolted from inside. Nobody got into that place uninvited.”

  “Could the perp have climbed up and over the stoops and gotten away?” Moose Ryan asked.

  “Possibility,” McMahon said, “but the really odd thing is that Forensic couldn’t find any trace of blood leading away from the scene. Now you tell me how someone does a number like that, and doesn’t get himself soaked in blood?”

  Kings County Hospital occupies twenty-eight acres of land along Brooklyn’s Clarkson Avenue. Tall, tediously uniform buildings, looking more like stark monoliths than places for the care and treatment of the sick, stand like resolute sentinels over some of the inner city’s worst blight.

  Vinda drove the maroon department car along New York Avenue, and made a right-hand turn into Clarkson. The car’s wipers thudded against the accumulating snow. A woman hurried along the street, lugging a bundled-up child into the emergency room.

  Vinda drove into the morgue’s entrance and stopped in the driveway to identify himself to the security guard. “Park in visitors’ parking, Lou,” the retired cop told him. Vinda steered the car into the courtyard between the C and D buildings and parked. Foreboding gray afternoon clouds cast gloomy shadows over the snowy landscape. He got out of the car and, with his gloved hand, scooped snow off the windshield.

  A brick building resembling a school stood between the C and D towers. It was the medical examiner’s Brooklyn morgue. Several hearses idled by the loading bay.

  Snow crunched beneath Vinda’s feet as he made his way toward death’s warehouse. He had gone a short distance when a woman’s voice called out his name. Detective Adriene Agueda was walking down C Building’s ramp, waving to him. With her was another woman.

  “Hi,” Vinda said, watching them coming over to him.

  “Lou, this is Detective Joan Hagstrom, the newest member of Brooklyn South’s Sex Crimes Unit,” Agueda said.

  “Hello,” Vinda said to the detective.

  “I’ve been trying for years to get the good lieutenant here to join the Hispanic Society, but he refuses to go for the twenty-buck initiation fee,” Agueda told Hagstrom.

  “First of all, Detective Agueda, I’m Portuguese, not Spanish,” he said in an exaggerated accent, “and second, I happen to believe that there are too many religious, fraternal, and ethnic organizations in the Job; and third, when I was a kid, I always got ‘F’ in ‘Plays and Gets Along Well with Others.’”

  “A likely story,” Agueda said, brushing her thick black forelock from her forehead, and smiling at him. “What brings you out of the Big Building on such a cold day?”

  “Following up on a missing-person case,” he lied. “What about you?”

  “We got some scuzzball operating in the borough who gets off on sodomizing women over seventy,” Hagstrom said.

  Vinda winced. “Why, Detective Hagstrom, don’t you realize that the poor man is probably acting out some horrible psychological trauma of his childhood, and shouldn’t be held responsible for his acts?”

  “Really?” Agueda said. “Well, Lou, when we catch up with him, we’re going to cut off his trauma and end all his problems.”

  “Right on, Detective Agueda,” Vinda said, and turned to leave.

  Adriene Agueda hurriedly said, “I was sorry to hear about Jean.”

  “Thank you,” he said, and walked away. He knew that she was sorry for
his loss, but that there was much more that she wanted to say to him. At this point in his life, he couldn’t deal with it. Knowing that he couldn’t postpone a conversation with Agueda forever, he pushed aside the two swinging doors that led into the pathology suite.

  Dr. Patricia Marcal, an assistant medical examiner, was a handsome woman of considerable girth. Dressed in a lab coat, with her pince-nez dangling from a long silver chain around her neck, she was perched atop a stool, peering into a microscope, when Vinda knocked and walked into the room. “Hi, beautiful.”

  She spun around. “When did they let you back out in the street?” She slid off her perch and hugged him. “It’s good to see you, John.”

  Leaning back so that he might better see her face, he said, “You’re as lovely as ever.” He kissed her cheek.

  “Don’t you try that olive-oil charm of yours on me, John Vinda. I’m a happily married lady.” She released her grip on him, a sad cast coming over her cheerful face. “How are you managing?”

  “I guess okay. I take it a day at a time. I’m glad her suffering is over, but I miss her very much.”

  “I know. Anyway, what brings you here?”

  “Mary Lucas and Thelma Johnston.”

  Concern furrowed her brow. She had seen many good cops shoved down the drain of obscurity because they stumbled into homicides that turned out to be racial or political or both. “Pass on them, John. My guts tell me they’re the kind of cases that could end careers.”

  “I can’t. They’re my ticket out of purgatory.”

  She sighed and affectionately patted his cheek. “I can’t tell you what killed them, but I can tell you how they were killed. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  Thelma Johnston lay atop a stainless-steel table with draining canals around the sides and top. Her sternum had been sliced and pried open, and her cranial vault sawed off and her brain removed, leaving in its place a bleached white bowl. Stacked body organs were on a tray next to the table. “I did the post on both victims,” she said, turning the corpse’s head so he might better examine the wound.

  Bending at the knees, he closely studied the gaping hole in the dead woman’s throat.

  “The common carotid artery, the jugular vein, and the superior thyroid artery of both victims had been severed,” Marcal explained. “It’s almost as though some sharp instrument slashed around inside their throats. And, John, there are no entrance marks, no puncture wounds. But look here, to the right and a little below the wound.”

  Vinda saw what appeared to be two bruises about two inches apart. He ran his finger over them. “They appear to be puncture wounds that didn’t break the skin.”

  “That’s right. Both victims had the exact same marks in exactly the same spot.”

  “Could an animal have done this?”

  “No way. Animals rip and tear at the flesh, leaving teeth marks on their prey. There were no dental impressions on either victim.” She pulled a pair of plastic gloves out of a nearby box, stretched them over her hands, set her pince-nez on her nose, and stuck her thumb and forefinger into the lesion, groping for parts. Stretching out a severed vein and artery, she said, “Look at these. They’ve been surgically severed.”

  Vinda took the body parts in his hands; blood oozed out of the artery. “What could have done this?”

  “An instrument that makes a massive puncture wound going in and slices coming out.”

  “Was any trace evidence found?”

  “The clothing of both victims was vacuumed, and we found nothing that could be of value for microscopic or instrumental analysis.”

  “We’re batting zero.”

  “I did standard hematocrit tests on both victims to measure the amount of blood in the body. Both tests were inconclusive.”

  “Why?”

  “As soon as an artery is severed, there is a forceful rush of blood that continues until the heart stops pumping. The body contains about eleven and a half pints of blood. We sopped up as much as we could at both crime scenes; we still can’t be sure how much blood is unaccounted for—if any.”

  Vinda frowned and said in a puzzled tone, “I examined all the crime-scene photos, and couldn’t find any trace of blood leading away from the area.”

  The pathologist looked at the policeman, shrugged, and said, “Maybe this guy can fly.”

  FOUR

  The unmarked police car slid along the curb and parked in front of Thelma Johnston’s house on St. Marks Avenue. It was six-thirty in the evening, and winter’s darkness had cast its cheerless hue over the city.

  Moose Ryan and Marsella remained inside the car, staring out at the row of gracious brownstones carefully maintained by the residents of this middle-class enclave. Neither man paid much attention to the police calls coming over the radio. They had just come from interviewing Mary Lucas’s family, and their thoughts were full of the despair and grief they had just left. Mary Lucas’s mother, her face blank with shock and disbelief, sat in a wicker rocking chair, clutching a photograph of her murdered daughter to her chest, staring vacantly ahead, her lips mumbling a prayer. The dead woman’s children, and her sister, moved about like dazed sleepwalkers, afraid to wake to the horrors of real life. The mother could not be brought back to reality long enough to be interviewed, which meant that the detectives would have to return at some later date to speak to her.

  Marsella reached into the bag on his lap, took out a container, and handed it to Moose. “Let some air in here,” Moose said, prying off the plastic lid.

  Marsella pressed the door button, and the window slid down a few inches. Frigid air swept through the car. “Lucas’s family were genuinely nice people,” Marsella said, setting his container down on the lid of the glove compartment.

  “Yeah.” Moose sipped coffee, then put his container on the dashboard. Steam vapored the windshield. “Being off the street for a while almost makes you forget the shit that goes on there, like what heartbreak looks like.”

  Marsella closed his eyes and leaned his head back. After a while he said, “My dad did almost thirty years in the Job, and when I came on, he told me to keep my fly closed and my eyes open. But when I saw my first DOA child, a six-year-old crushed under the wheels of an oil truck, I knew that a cop hadda get some kind of a crutch to help him forget all the shit he sees.”

  Moose glanced at his partner. “So you forget by running around with your fly at half-mast?”

  “Friend, when you find something better than pussy, call me.” He picked up the container and, holding it in front of his mouth, said, “I wonder how I’d react to losing one of my children like that. Having some nut job rip out their throats.” He drank, pulled a sour face. Cracking the door, he dumped out the coffee. “Why do cops drink so much of this crap, anyway? I don’t even like the stuff.”

  “Me either,” Ryan said, and emptied his out the window. “Ya know, it’s one thing to lose a child to disease, but to have some scumbucket kill them?”

  “I really wanna get this guy, Moose.”

  “Me too,” Ryan said, and shoved open the door.

  The name on the doorbell was Johnston. Marsella pressed the button. They waited inside the vestibule, looking beyond the curtains at the mahogany staircase. A lanky man with steel-gray hair walked out of a side room. The man’s black tie was askew, his shirt collar open. Walking to the door, he assessed the two white men waiting on the other side, and smiled faintly as he opened the door. “How ya doin’? I’m Ken Hayes. I’m with the Housing Police.”

  The instant rapport of cops took hold as the three policemen shook hands and the two NYPD detectives introduced themselves. Hayes told them he was Thelma Johnston’s brother-in-law, and watched as the detectives struggled out of their rubber overshoes and placed them on a sheet of newspaper next to the radiator. Hayes led them into a parlor with high ceilings and elaborate nineteenth-century molding. A frail old woman, her dazed face lined with grief, sat on a brocaded sofa, cradling two scared children and singsonging a Baptist prayer.

/>   “That’s Thelma’s mother and children, Dwuana and James,” Hayes said.

  The other people in the parlor continued their hushed conversations as Hayes led the detectives into the dining room, where a woman sat at a butcher-block table, dabbing her eyes with a lace handkerchief.

  “This is Thelma’s sister, my wife, Sirlena,” Hayes said, sliding a consoling arm around her shoulder. He introduced the detectives to his wife, telling her that they were assigned to Thelma’s case. Her tear-swollen eyes moved up to meet theirs. “It’s not fair, it’s just not fair,” she lamented. “Thelma worked so darn hard to make a home for her children. So hard. And then to have this happen.” She slammed her fist down on top of the table and cried.

  Moose Ryan bit down on his lip. “We’re doing everything possible to catch the person responsible.”

  “I know that,” she sobbed. “We come from a police family. My dad, my husband, my brothers.”

  “Are your brothers here?” Marsella asked.

  “They’re making the arrangements for Thelma,” she said.

  “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to hurt your sister?” Moose asked gently.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head and blowing her nose.

  “What about someone from her past, when she was into the drug scene?” Marsella asked.

  Outraged by his question, she glared up at the detective and said, “My sister walked away from that sleaze and never looked back. She started a new life for herself and her family.”

  Marsella nodded and asked, “Where is her husband?”

  “He was a no-good drunk who used to beat up on Thelma. The drink finally killed him,” she said.

  Stealing a look at the grandmother and children in the next room, Moose asked, “What’s going to happen to them?”