by Lee Killough
He stood with face set, ready to catch Verneau if need be, though the attendant brought the body to the public viewing area and folded back the sheet just enough to reveal the face, not the neck.
Verneau swallowed hard. “Son of a bitch. Yes…that’s Gary.”
The attendant lowered the sheet and they left the morgue.
“When was the last time you saw him?” Harry asked.
Verneau sucked in a breath. “Last night. The exhibition hall closes at seven and we walked out together.”
“Do you know what his plans were for the evening?”
“Eating out with conventioneers, I suppose. He did Monday night, and that was his usual practice…to make personal contacts, you know.”
“Did he happen to mention any names, or where he was going?”
“Not to me.”
“A watch and ring were taken from him. Can you describe them?”
Verneau shook his head. “Maybe his wife can. She’s in Denver.” He sucked in another breath. “God, this doesn’t seem real.”
Garreth said, “He had a large bruise on his neck. Do you remember seeing it last night?”
“Bruise?” Verneau blinked. “I — no, I don’t remember. How did this happen? Wouldn’t a mugger just rob him? He wouldn’t have resisted; he always said you give them what they want, that property can always be replaced. He never carried much in the evening anyway…one credit card and enough cash for the evening. Would someone kill him because he didn’t have much?”
Harry caught Garreth’s eye. “Why don’t I take Mr. Verneau back to the Moscone and talk to people there, then go to Mossman’s hotel. You get on the horn to Denver PD and have them contact the wife. See if she knows his enemies. Tell them we need a description of his jewelry to put out to the pawnshops. See you later.”
5
Garreth hung up the phone. Denver was sending someone to break the news to Mossman’s wife. They promised to get back about the jewelry. A message from the Coast Guard lay on Harry’s desk. According to their charts, the body had most likely gone in somewhere along the southern end of the Embarcadero and the China Basin, although probably not as far south as Potrero’s Point. Garreth noted the information in his notebook. They would need to talk to people in that area. Perhaps someone had seen something.
Serruto came out of his office to sit on a corner of Garreth’s desk. “What’s the story on the floater?”
Garreth gave him what they had so far.
Serruto frowned. “Robbery? Odd the thief didn’t take the hotel key, too, so he could rifle the room.”
“Unless it’s only supposed to look like a robbery.”
The lieutenant tugged at an ear. “You have other thoughts?”
“There’s a bruise on his neck.” Garreth held a circle of his thumb and first finger against his own neck to indicate the size and location. “I remember another case in the last several years with the same kind of mark, also with a broken neck.”
Serruto pursed his lips for a minute, then shook his head. “Doesn’t ring any bells. Keep thinking. Maybe you’ll remember more.” He went back to his office.
Garreth looked around the room. Evelyn Kolb and Art Schneider worked at their desks. He asked them if they remembered the case.
Kolb pumped the top of the thermos she brought to work every day, filling her cup with steaming tea. “Not me. Art?”
He shook his head. “Sorry.”
Garreth sighed. Damn. If only he could remember something more. Like who worked the case.
Loud footsteps brought his attention around to the door. Earl Faye and Dean Centrello stormed in.
He raised his brows. “You two didn’t wreck another car, did you?”
Faye flung himself into his chair. Centrello snarled, “You know the Isenmeier thing? Turkey tried to cut up his girlfriend? Well, we have everything set to arrest the dude, statements from the neighbors and a warrant in the works. Then the lady says it’s off. She refuses to press charges. Seems he asked her to many him.”
“Save the warrant,” Schneider said. “You can use it next time.”
“Lord, I’d hate to see this fox chopped up.” Faye rolled his eyes. “Everything she wears is either transparent or painted on. The first time we went to see — ”
Kolb cocked a brow at Garreth. “Comes a pause in the day’s occupation that is known as the fairy-tale hour.”
Faye frowned but continued talking. Garreth listened with amusement. Faye was walking proof that the art of storytelling remained alive and well. If short on anecdotes, he waxed eloquent on women or sports, or described crime scenes in graphic detail. That thought nudged something in Garreth’s head. He suspended all other thought, groping for the nudge. Only to be interrupted by the telephone. His feeling of being close to something faded.
With a sigh, Garreth reached for the receiver. “Homicide, Mikaelian.”
“We’re starting the autopsy on your floater, Inspector.”
Garreth gathered a handful of wintergreen candy from a sack in his desk to eat downstairs…the pungent odor of the candy his best defense against the morgue smell.
6
Not every room in the ME’s office echoed. The autopsy room with its row of trough-like steel tables did not. It always sounded horribly quiet…no footsteps or casual chatter, only the droning voices of the pathologists dictating their findings into the microphones dangling from the ceiling and the whisper of running water washing down the tables, carrying away the blood.
Ho had already opened the abdominal cavity and removed the viscera when Garreth came in and stood at the head of the table, hands buried in his suit coat pockets. She nodded a greeting at him, never breaking her monologue.
The water ran clear this time, Garreth noticed. Even that in the sink at the foot of the table, usually rosy from the organs floating in it awaiting sectioning, sat colorless. The doctor examined the organs one at a time, slicing them like loaves of bread with quick, sure strokes of her knife and peering at each section…and tossing some slices into specimen containers. She opened the trachea its full length and snipped apart the heart to check each of its chambers and valves. As Garreth watched, a crease appeared between her eyes. She moved back to the empty gray shell that had been a man and went over the skin surface carefully, even rolling the body on its side to peer at the back. She explored the edges of the neck wound.
The neck had another mark, too, Garreth noticed, one that had been hidden before by the dead man’s shirt. A thin red line ran around, biting deep on the sides. Strangulation, too…or something on a chain ripped off?
“Trouble?” he asked.
Ho looked up. “Exsanguination is indeed the cause of death. However…”
Garreth waited expectantly.
“Not because his throat was cut. That occurred post-mortem. So did the broken neck.”
Deja vu struck him again. Victim bled to death but the knife wounds and broken neck were inflicted after death. Garreth strained to remember more details, something that would identify the case.
“He didn’t bleed to death internally and I can’t find any exterior wound to account for — ”
“What about the bruise?” Garreth interrupted. There had been something else strange about that bruise on the other man. Now, what had it been?
“…for a blood loss of that magnitude,” the doctor went on with a frown at Garreth, “unless we assume that the punctures in the jugular vein were made by needles and the blood drained that way.”
That was the other thing about the bruise! “Two punctures, right? About an inch and a half apart, in the middle of the bruise?”
She regarded him gravely. “I could have used your crystal ball before I began, Inspector. It would have saved me work.”
Garreth smiled. Inside, however, he swore. He remembered that much, those facts, but still nothing to help him locate the case in the files, not a victim or detective’s name.
The remainder of the autopsy proceeded uneventfully. L
ack of water in the lungs established that the victim had been dead before entering the water. The skull and brain showed no signs of bruises or hemorrhage to indicate that he might have been struck and knocked unconscious. The stomach contained no food, only liquid.
“Looks like he died some time after his last meal. We’ll analyze the liquid,” the doctor said.
Garreth bet it proved alcoholic.
When the body was on the way back to the freezer, Garreth prepared to leave. He had missed lunch but with no appetite perhaps he should just go on to the convention center. At least the fog had burned off, leaving a bright, clear day.
Before leaving the ME’s, he used one of their phones to call up to Homicide, to John Leyva, their clerk in the outer office. “Has the Denver PD sent me descriptions of some men’s jewelry?”
Papers rattled, then: “No,” Leyva said, “but a Mrs. Elvira Hogue wants you to call her.”
One of the witnesses to the Mission Street bodega shooting. Garreth reached for his notebook. “Thanks…I have the number,” he said as Leyva started to read it off…and dialed it as soon as he broke communication with Homicide. “Mrs. Hogue? This is Inspector Mikaelian. You wanted to talk to me?” She had good news he hoped.
“Yes.” Her thin, old-woman’s voice came back over the wire. “I saw the boy who did it, and I learned his name.”
Garreth pumped a fist. Yes, good news! “That’s great!”
“You remember I told you I’ve seen him in the neighborhood before? Well, he was here this morning again, bold as brass, talking to that Hambright girl up the street. I walked very close to them and I heard her call him Wink.”
“Mrs. Hogue, thank you very much!”
“You catch that skunk. Senor Campera was a nice gentleman.”
Garreth headed for Records to check the name Wink through the moniker file.
They came up with a make, one Leroy Martin Luther O’Hare, called Wink, as in “quick as a,” for the way he snatched purses in his juvenile delinquency days by sweeping past victims on a skateboard. Purse snatching had been only one of his offenses. Wink added burglary and auto theft to his yellow sheet as he approached legal adulthood, though he had not been convicted of either charge.
Garreth headed for his personal car in the parking lot — a Prussian red Datsun ZX he and Marti had given each other their last anniversary — and with Wink’s photograph tucked among five others of young black males for a photo lineup, drove to Mrs. Hogue’s house.
She quickly picked out Wink. “That’s him; that’s the one I saw this morning and the one I saw coming out of the bodega after I heard the shooting.”
Garreth called Serruto.
“We’ll get a warrant for him,” the lieutenant said.
Garreth visited Wink’s mother and girlfriend, Rosella Hambright. He also talked to the neighbors of both. No one, of course, offered any help. Garreth gained the impression that even Wink’s mother hardly knew the person Garreth asked about. The neighbors denied any knowledge of comings and goings from Mrs. O’Hare’s or Miss Hambright’s apartment.
“Hey, man, I gots enough to do chasin’ rats over here without watchin’ someone else over there,” they said, or else: “You wrong about Wink. He no good, but he no holdup man. He never owned no gun.”
Garreth dropped word of wanting Wink into a few receptive ears whose owners knew he would reward good information, then he headed for the Westin. He would see Serruto about staking out the mother’s and girlfriend’s apartments. For now, he better check in with Harry before his partner put out an APB on him.
7
He missed Harry at the Westin and arrived back in Homicide to find Harry starting reports. After a rundown of Garreth’s day, he sighed. “So we both came up empty.”
“Except for identifying our bodega gunman and the odd results of the autopsy.” Garreth rolled a report form into his typewriter. “Did I miss anything interesting at the Moscone?”
“Just Susan Pegans fainting dead away when we told her about Mossman…and here I thought women swooning went out with whalebone corsets. No one I talked to, conventioneers or other exhibitors around Kitco’s booth, saw him last night or knew where he was going.”
Garreth began his report. “Find anything useful in his room?”
“Nothing telling us where he went. He had clothes, a couple of paperbacks, a return plane ticket to Denver. He left his exhibitor’s badge…and did go out light, like Verneau said. Personal keys, several other credit cards, two hundred in cash, and another two hundred in traveler’s checks were under a false bottom of his shaving kit. No billfold, so he must have had that on him when he was killed. He made two calls, one Monday and one last night, both a little after seven in the evening and both to his home phone in Denver.”
“Tomorrow why don’t I check the cab companies to see if one of them took a fare of Mossman’s description anywhere last night?”
“Do that.”
Garreth remembered then that he needed to talk to the lieutenant. He knocked on Serruto’s door. “Got a minute?”
“If it’s about the warrant on O’Hare, we have it. There’s an APB out on him, too.”
“I’d like to stake out his mother’s and girlfriend’s apartments. He’s bound to get in touch with one or the other.”
Serruto leaned back in his chair. “Why don’t we see if the APB and your street contacts locate him first? Two stakeouts use a lot of men.” He did not say it, but Garreth heard, nonetheless: We can’t spend that much manpower on one small-time crook.
Garreth nodded, sighing inwardly — all were not equal in the eyes of the law — and went back to his typewriter.
An hour later he and Harry checked out for the night.
8
Garreth always liked going home with Harry. The house had the same atmosphere Marti gave their apartment, a sense of sanctuary. The job ended at the door. Inside, he and Harry became ordinary men. Where Marti had urged him to talk, however, Lien bled away tensions with diversion and serenity. A judicious scattering of Oriental objects among the house’s contemporary furnishings reflected the culture of her Taiwanese childhood and Harry’s Japanese grandparents. The paintings on the walls, mostly Lien’s and including examples of her commercial artwork, reflected Oriental tradition and moods.
Lien stared at them in disbelief. “Home before dark? How did you do it?”
Harry lowered his voice to a conspiratorial tone. “We went over the wall. If someone calls, you haven’t seen us.” He kissed her with a great show of passion. “What’s for supper? I’m starved.”
“Not lately.” She patted his stomach fondly. “Both of you sit down; I’ll bring tea.”
Strong and laced with rum…an example of what Garreth considered a happy blend of West and East. Between sips of tea, he pulled off his shoes and tie. One by one his nerves loosened. These days, he reflected, Harry’s house felt more like home than his own apartment did.
During dinner Lien monopolized the conversation, heading off shop talk with anecdotes from her own day. She brushed by the frustrations of finishing drawings for a fashion spread in Sunday’s Chronicle to talk about the art appreciation classes she taught at various grade schools in the afternoons. Garreth listened bemused. Her kids came from a different world than he saw everyday. Free of drugs, well fed and cared for, bright-eyed with promise. Sometimes he wondered if she deliberately told only cheerful stories. Not that he objected; he liked hearing about a pleasant world populated by happy, friendly people.
Not that he regretted becoming a cop, either. Just…sometimes he wondered what he might be doing now, what kind of world he would live in, if he had finished college…if he had been good enough to win a football scholarship like his older brother Shane, if he and Judith had not married so young, if she had not gotten pregnant his sophomore year and had to stop working, leaving them with no money to continue school.
Or would things have been any different? He always wanted to be like his father. He loved visit
ing the station and sometimes riding along in his father’s patrol car, learning how to handle a nightstick, going to the firing range. While Shane had been starring in backyard scrimmages and Little League football, Garreth played cops and robbers. Police work seemed a natural choice when he had to go to work.
After dinner, helping Lien with the dishes, he asked, “Do you believe people really have free choice, or are they pushed in inevitable directions by social conditioning?”
She smiled at him. “Of course they have choices. Background may limit or influence, but the choices are still there.”
He considered that. “Consulting I Ching isn’t a contradiction of that?”
“Certainly not. If anything, the Sage supports the idea that people have control over their futures. He merely advises of the possibilities.” She looked up in concern. “What’s the matter? Are the dreadful broody what-ifs chewing at you?”
He smiled at her understanding. “Sort of.”
Maybe what really chewed on him was Mossman, who had lost all choice. He worked at keeping emotional distance from murder victims without becoming indifferent to the crime. Otherwise, he knew, he could screw up his head and burn out. Mossman and his peculiar bruise, though, haunted him…maybe because of the bruise, whose twin case eluded him? It lurked in the back of his mind the rest of the evening, even through the excitement of watching the Giants win a 1–0 squeaker. He stared at the TV screen with Harry, trying to pull the case out of his memory and asking himself who would stick two needles into someone’s jugular and drain out all his blood. It sounded like something from a horror movie.