So that was that. Tony's pushing sixty, been in the game a long time, and knows a corpse when he meets one. I was just about to sign off when he added, “Oh, one other thing about that Cord business, Mr. Riordan."
"What?"
"Last night somebody stole his body out the morgue. I oughta get a bonus next month, telling you alla this."
* * * *
At two the next morning, I got tired of lying in bed with my eyes open and lurched into the kitchen and got myself a glass of warm milk.
Sam Spade would've had a shot of whiskey, but Sam had a copper-coated gut and I don't. I was sitting at the table licking milk off my mustache when my wife Shelley shuffled in, wearing her pink robe and bunny slippers, and asked what was the matter.
"And don't say insomnia,” she added. “I can see that. I mean, what's the matter?"
"You remember Ted Dance from high school?"
"Do I. Great guy, I loved him. He took me to the senior formal."
"Why'd you go with him?"
"Well, for one thing, you were hung up on Sonata Diaz and didn't know I existed. For another thing, Ted's well named—he's a great dancer. For a third thing, I didn't have to keep peeling his hands off my buns, like with certain other guys I could mention. For a fourth thing—"
"Okay, okay. Maybe you should have married him. He's got a ton of money now."
"Uh-uh. I can't sleep in a crowd, especially a crowd of strange men. Now, getting back to the original question, why can't you sleep?"
"Ted's a client now. Also he's gone nuts. At least I hope he has."
Naturally I had to explain about the zombie lover, the vanishing corpse, etc. Shelley agreed that the coincidence was sort of twitchy. But, she pointed out, corpses do not walk, period.
"Probably the body-snatching was something fairly ordinary. Like a crooked doctor wants to harvest the organs, or a necrophiliac likes the guy's looks."
"Where do you get your ideas of what's ordinary?"
"Watching Jerry Springer."
"On that note, I think I'll go back to bed."
When we were again side by side and horizontal in the dark, she murmured, “Try counting backward from a thousand."
"Why backward?"
"It's more boring that way. Nighty-night. Don't let the bedbugs bite."
I reached, I think, 987 before my eyes opened on a bright sunlit day. Warm milk and counting backward from a thousand, I thought while showering. Got to remember the formula.
Had a good breakfast. Kissed the nice lady who fried the eggs and went to work, while she set off for the University of Miami, where she was going for her M.A. in Literature, don't ask me why.
The phone was ringing when I got to my desk, and it was Bliss, the guy guarding Ted's place. He explained that when he went on duty the night before, he put a fresh tape in a security camera that sweeps Biscayne Boulevard, then watched the old one on a monitor. Turned out that early yesterday morning, there had been somebody watching the house. So Ted might be crazy, but he hadn't fantasized that.
"Guy showed up at 1:45. It's a real grainy tape, the image is lousy, but it's kind of strange the way he just stands there, staring."
"What's he look like?"
"He's wearing a white suit that's about six sizes too big for him, and he's got a birthmark or something right in the middle of his forehead. You wanna take a look?"
"I'll be down in twenty minutes. Anything else?"
"This morning about 2:30 we had a prowler. Somebody climbed up on the southside wall, where it runs along the service alley between Mr. Dance's place and the house next door. Musta got into the alley from the beach."
"What happened?"
"Well, I had Suzette with me. You know Suzette? Eyetalian mastiff, kind of a brindle coat?"
"Yeah. Sweet dog if she likes you. Otherwise you're Alpo."
"Right. Well, it was raining like hell when all of a sudden Suzette jumped up and went berserk. I switched on the floodlights and grabbed my Glock and ran outside. I could hear somebody walking on top the wall, because there's broken glass set in the concrete and he was crunching it. Suzette was kind of ravening, I guess the word is, and he musta got scared, because he jumped back into the alley and took off. I put on her leash and went out the back gate onto the beach, but nothing was there except footprints in the sand. The rain was washing them out fast, but I could see they was running prints—deep toes, no heels. And the guy was barefoot. Can you imagine a barefoot guy walking on broken glass?"
"He leave any blood on the wall?"
"Well, it took me a while to find a ladder, and if there was any blood the rain had washed it off by then."
So back to Ted's I went. I was starting to wear a groove in that highway. I viewed the old tape and saw the guy in white leaning on a building across Biscayne and staring at Ted's house with three dark spots, two of which were probably eyes. I told Bliss when he went off duty to drop the tape at a photo lab called Image/Inc and ask them to sharpen up the face if possible, and also give me an estimate of the guy's height.
Then I tracked Ted to the windowless office where he writes his novels on a flat-screen HP and emails them to some lady in Portland, Oregon, who checks facts and copyedits. I asked him for a picture of Zane Cord, and he brought me a color shot. At first glance, Zane looked like just one more male prostie, slim and dark with plucked brows and greenish eye shadow. But he had a Hitler-type hypnotic stare and one of those smiles that stops where it starts and never spreads around. The eyes and the mouth looked totally disconnected, as if he'd borrowed them from different faces.
"So what do you think?” Ted asked.
"If he was a dog, I'd put him down."
He sighed. “Here I asked Dear Abby for advice on my love life, when I should've asked you."
"If you don't mind the extra expense, Ted, I think we'll go to two guards instead of one, and do twenty-four/seven for the time being. You have a nice day."
Back at the office, I dispatched Bliss's daytime replacement, instructing the guy to stick to Ted like duct tape whenever he went out. When they were at home, he was to prowl the house and keep an eye not only on the servants—Ted had three, plus the gardener—but also on tradesmen, meter readers, and mailpersons. Of course, if Zane Cord actually was walking around with a big hole in the middle of his forehead, he'd be pretty easy to spot even wearing cable-guy coveralls. But I wasn't ready to admit that was a real possibility.
I also had my secretary run copies of the picture, give one to the guard, and fax a copy to a morgue tech who was on my payroll. Five minutes later the picture came back, and scrawled across it were the words, “Checked him in night before last.” So I phoned the tech, and we had an interesting if creepy chat. He's the only guy I ever listened to besides Peter Lorre whose voice sounds wet.
He said the M.E. had been clearing a backlog that night and they all worked late. Toward nine o'clock, he removed Cord from the fridge and prepped the stiff for autopsy, leaving it on a gurney covered by a plastic sheet. Meanwhile the doc was doing another body, using his branch lopper and oscillating saw and other delicate instruments of his craft to split the wishbone, take off the top of the cranium, etc. With everyone crowded around the table, Cord was forgotten until the M.E. finished and sent the tech to fetch the next customer. The gurney was there, but Cord was gone—sheet and all.
"Was the door locked?"
"Yeah, but not from the inside. You want to go to the john or something, you punch a button and the door opens."
So, I thought, somebody opened the door and an accomplice snatched the body. I promised the tech his usual bribe, then spent the rest of the day interviewing people we needed to beef up the staff at the museum. I selected four with plausible resumes and was just beginning to think about going home, when a lady from Image/Inc. called about the security tape.
Her basic message was wow, what a crappy picture to try to work with, so typical of security cameras. Just as a matter of curiosity, she added, what was the guy d
oing, anyway—going to a toga party?
"Toga party?"
"Yeah. I mean, he's wearing a sheet, right?"
I was still absorbing that when she explained that the image of the building he was leaning on had sharpened up enough so she could count the tiers of brick. That gave a fairly exact measure of the figure's height, about 1.8 meters.
"What's that in American numbers?"
She said about six feet. I thanked her, called Ted and asked him how tall Zane Cord used to be. He said oh, maybe six feet.
After that I left the office, went to my favorite watering hole, sat down at the bar and had a number of double scotches in quick succession. Maybe Sam Spade had the right idea after all.
* * * *
Shelley was home when I got there, and she wanted to know the latest on Ted's problem. I told her that whether or not his ex-boyfriend was walking, he sure was getting around. I also admitted frankly that I was fresh out of ideas on the case, except maybe to hire a witch doctor.
She suggested trying instead to get a more rounded picture of Zane. “Find out what he was like, what kind of friends he had, what he was involved in. Try the Internet. Maybe you'll get a lead."
So next morning I started tracking the real Zane Cord. My Internet expert is a second-generation Haitian immigrant named Helène Duvalier, who can break into anything, including medical and juvenile-court records I used to think were secret. Just before lunch, she breezed through my office on a gust of flowery scent and dropped a wad of printout on my desk. I set aside the museum stuff I'd been working on, and proceeded to learn everything I never wanted to know about Zane Cord.
Most of his story was depressingly familiar. Abandoned by his father, Zane was arrested at age nine for trying to burn down his school. Arrested again at thirteen for attempting to murder his mother, he got sent to a snake pit called the Florida Training Facility for Boys, where he probably started as a rapee and ended as a rapist. Released back into the community at eighteen—lucky community—he got on with a gay escort service and made his living as rough trade plowing the rich soil of the Gold Coast, while also pursuing other interests, such as narcotics trafficking and possible involvement in a contract killing.
He described his profession as actor, had some small parts in Miami After Dark, and made a sixty-minute porno film entitled Crazy Cock. A drug overdose took him into a psychiatric facility where he was detoxed and diagnosed with sociopathic personality disorder. Turned loose again, he was jailed on a weapons charge but ROR'd—released on his own recognizance—within hours, and later put on unsupervised probation. The charmed life he led despite his many brushes with the law indicated that he knew some important guys willing to go to bat for him. In return they probably took payment in trade, in the most literal sense of the term trade.
Shelley was shocked when I told her what I'd found out. She still thought of Ted as the boy who took her to the formal, who was handsome and polite and fun and sexy too, in his own way, yet so fastidious that people called him Mr. Sweetpants, because he used scented deodorant and never even said shit if he could help it. Somebody like that shouldn't have touched Zane Cord with oven mitts—unless he had a self-destructive streak like Oscar Wilde, who also got a thrill from associating with young thugs. “Feasting with panthers,” he called it.
"Better check out his other lovers,” she advised. “There may be another panther out there. Somebody who stole the body and now is setting Ted up for some kind of an extortion scheme. Or maybe just tormenting him for the fun of it."
Frankly, at this point I was running out of natural explanations for what was going on. But as an obedient spouse, who also had no useful ideas of my own, in the morning I drove back through the latest batch of rain to old Biscayne Boulevard, where the storm drains were spouting like whales. The guard I'd sent for the daytime shift admitted me through a brand new security gate that looked strong enough to stop a Russian tank.
I found Ted upstairs in his office, doing research on an Internet site called Occultworld.com. I asked if he could think of anybody in his past who might be exploiting his problem with Zane Cord for fun or profit. He shook his head.
"I have good relations with my exes, exchange Christmas cards, send wedding presents when they marry, especially when they marry each other. Until I met Zane, keep it civilized was my motto."
"Just for my own peace of mind, Ted, send me a list of your exes’ names and current addresses. Let me run them against a couple of databases I have illegal access to. If anything turns up, I'll bring you the information and let you decide whether I check them out any further."
He didn't like that. Said he hated to kiss and tell. But as I pointed out, unusual times require unusual measures, so in the end he agreed to give me what I wanted. I headed out into the hall, only to meet my man Bliss wearing clothes that seemed a bit rich for a guy making 28K a year.
"I wasn't feeling too good when I got off duty this morning,” he explained, “so Mr. Dance let me sack out in one of his guest rooms."
I gave Bliss a really hard look, maybe for the first time—big guy, blond, almost a baby face. Good record with the MPs in Iraq, which was why I'd hired him. What was he up to, anyway? I don't give a damn about my employees’ private lives, but I don't like them hustling the clients.
"He loan you some of his clothes, too?"
"Well, the maid's getting mine cleaned and pressed."
"Don't forget you go back on duty at eight p.m."
"Don't worry, Mr. Riordan. I'll be right here."
In the foyer I stopped to say hello to the daytime guard, who was sitting at a gilded table sloppily eating a meatball sandwich.
"I guess Bliss will be on time tonight?” he asked through a mouthful. “I got me a date with a hottie."
"Should be. He doesn't have far to travel."
That afternoon Ted's list of exes arrived by fax and I passed it on to Helène. She researched it and deposited a pile of hardcopy on my desk that could have choked a Budweiser horse. Included were guys from the worlds of art and publishing, half a dozen military types, the mayor of a small town in New England, two ordained ministers, and three men I knew personally, all now husbands and fathers. No criminals, nobody with a record of violence. At home I told Shelley she was wrong about Ted having other panthers in his zoo. Zane really had been an aberration.
"And,” I added firmly, “that's all the time I waste today on our favorite fag's goddamn love life. Tomorrow night's the ball, but tonight you and me are eating out, just the two of us, candlelight, wine, the works. And when we get home, we're gonna have some love life of our own."
"Good plan, Manfred,” she replied.
We went to Alciatore's, had cocktails, ate stone crabs, drank a bottle of Pouilly, returned home pleasantly buzzed, went straight to bed and carried out the rest of my plan. Several times, in fact—not that I'm bragging. So the night started real well, but it didn't last. Phone rang at 4:21, and it was Bliss reporting a new incident.
"Bastard bent the security gate,” he said, sounding rattled.
"Bent it? Those bars are three-quarter-inch rolled steel. He hit the gate with a tank, or what?"
"He didn't hit it with nothing,” said Bliss. “The bars are bent out, not in. He used his hands, that's all."
"He used his hands?"
"Yes, sir. And you ought to smell where he had a grip on the bars. There's some black juice smeared on the steel that come off him, and yuck. It smells like my Aunt Bea's freezer that I had to clean out after the last hurricane shut off her power for five days. I got Suzette chained up. You know how dogs go for anything that stinks."
"I'll be right down."
It was still dark when I got there, but floodlights blazing up under the eaves turned Ted's patio into a movie set. Bliss had made an accurate report, impossible as it sounded. The bars of the gate had been bent out more than an inch, just as if somebody had hitched a chain around them and yanked hard with a big truck. But I checked carefully and there was n
o mark of a chain, no scraping of the metal, nothing. The gunk on the steel smelled just as bad as Bliss had said.
I'd brought a kit and checked for finger- or handprints, amateurishly I'm sure, but no dice. Plenty smudges, but that was all. It would've been nice to have a professional CSI job done by the cops, but fat chance that we could get them interested, the kind of story we had to tell.
Bliss and I were just finishing when Ted came out of the house fully dressed, not a hair out of place. He looked more like a top-notch waiter than ever, for he was carrying a silver tray with three tall Bloody Marys and a quart of good gin and a bowl of ice. He even had a bag of dog munchies that he gave Suzette, thereby gaining still another female admirer. Meanwhile, us humans sat down at a cast-iron patio table and swilled and talked the situation over. It was a little early for serious drinking, but as I had told Ted, unusual times require unusual measures.
"Zane's not just a zombie anymore,” he said after downing his drink. “I've been reading up on this occult stuff, and nobody dead or alive has that kind of strength. His hatred is so intense he's become demonic. And that's the bad news."
"Any good news?"
"He's starting to decay. He needs his body to carry out his revenge, but it's starting to fall apart. Thank God for the Florida climate. If we were in Michigan, he might be around for months."
"I can have the stuff on the gate tested for DNA—"
"Manny, will you for Christ's sake cut out this fatuosity about gathering evidence? We know who's doing this. More information is exactly what we don't need."
"And another drink is exactly what we do need,” I suggested, not knowing what fatuosity meant anyhow.
After that we drank gin on the rocks while the stars faded out and the sun rose in a burst of rose and lemon and other colors Shelley could name but I can't. A cool salty breeze came off the ocean, a mockingbird started to sing in a white oleander, and the sky was blue with little pink clouds like the cotton balls she uses to take off nail polish. About the time we finished the bottle, a small plane buzzed overhead towing a sign that said Go, Gators!
It was the kind of day that makes Florida worthwhile, especially when you're drunk at dawn. Ted and Bliss seemed to agree, because they were holding hands and giving each other melting glances. It was time for me to say ciao, go back to work, and make final preps for the ball.
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