by Jude Hardin
I turned to walk away, but one of them called back to me. “Hey, lady cop.”
I stopped.
“Is there some sort of reward, or something, for information?”
It was the younger Latino in the green cap. His accent was Hispanic, but didn’t sound Mexican or Puerto Rican. I guessed South America.
“There might be,” I said. “Did you see something?”
His dark eyes looked me over, head to toe. “Give me your card. Maybe I call you if I remember.”
Was he hiding something? Greedy for a reward? Scared to talk? Playing some sort of game? High? None of the above?
I gave him a business card and waited.
He stared at me, saying nothing.
“Do you hang around here?” I asked.
“Sometimes.”
“Did you see the murder?”
A shrug.
“Did you see who might have killed him?”
Another shrug.
His two buddies laughed. I could have arrested all three of them for public intoxication and an open liquor container, but why? On very cold days, some homeless people would intentionally provoke cops to get a warm bed and a free meal for the night. If that as their intent, it wasn’t worth my time, or the paperwork.
“Call if you remember anything,” I repeated.
When I turned to go I almost got speared in the gut by my partner. Herb was carrying a plastic grocery bag in one hand and a long fork in the other, the kind you use to turn steaks on a barbecue grill.
“Stick around,” he said. “I’m going to roast some marshmallows.”
“Marshmallows?”
“Yeah, I’m starving. I bought some graham crackers and chocolate bars too. We can have s’mores.”
I shook my head and walked back to the Nova, where I found two large cups of coffee in the drink holders between the seats. I peeled the lid off one, took a sip, and watched Herb play summer camp with the alcoholics. A couple of minutes later, the uniform I’d spoken to earlier tapped on my window. Her nametag said S. Burwig.
“Got info on the car’s owner,” she said. “DMV and NCIC.”
She handed me a printout of his driver’s license and info. Hard to tell if the photo matched, considering our vic no longer had a face, but everything else seemed to fit. No priors, no record, no warrants.
“Thanks,” I said.
“I also called 411,” she said. “A hunch. Rich guy, might be listed.”
It was good thinking. “And?”
“There’s a Dr. William Shipman in the phone directory. Office is on Addison, a few blocks east.”
“Did you call them?”
“Yes. The answering service picked up, and they paged the person on call, a PA named Nancy Stearns. She told me Dr. Shipman left with some colleagues a few hours ago. He drives a silver Mercedes.”
“Good work.”
“So how’d he end up in the alley?”
I was thinking the same thing. “Could be he stopped for some smokes, lot was full. Figured he’d be in and out real quick. Or someone lured him into the alley somehow.”
“Drugs?” Burwig asked.
I couldn’t picture a rich doctor doing a dope deal in an alley.
“Someone could have flagged him over, yelling for help,” I said. “A doctor would respond, right? Or…”
“Or someone in the car with him made him pull into the alley,” Burwig said, finishing my thought.
“Someone angry enough to cut off the doctor’s face. Then take his wallet and make it look like a robbery. But why not take the car? Or the expensive shoes? You were first on scene, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you turn his car off?”
“No. It was already off.”
This was looking less and less like a robbery and more and more like premeditated murder.
“How long before the ME shows up?”
“He’s going to be a while. Said it’s been a busy night.”
“Aren’t they all?”
Burwig nodded, turned and walked away.
A few minutes later, Sergeant Benedict opened the passenger’s side door and climbed in, two blackened marshmallows dangling from the end of his barbecue fork.
“These are going to be heavenly” he said. “You like s’mores, right?”
“I’ll pass. Do you think he had car trouble?”
“Who?”
“The owner of the Benz. I just noticed his hood isn’t closed all the way. Maybe he stopped in the alley to check his engine.”
“Alley is dark,” Herb said. “Parking lot is lit up. Why not pull into the parking lot?”
Good point. I started my car.
“Where are we going?”
“Home,” I said.
“I thought you wanted to wait for the Medical Examiner.”
“We can stop by their office in the morning. I got probable ID on the victim, and it’s pretty obvious how he died.”
“Next of kin?”
“Not going to happen tonight. Need the M.E. to sign off, and I’m not going to knock on someone’s door at two A.M. with a maybe. We’ll handle it first thing tomorrow.”
I put the car in gear, steered toward the parking lot’s exit while Herb ferreted through his plastic grocery bag.
“Stop the car, Jack!”
I stopped the car. Herb was visibly distraught.
“What is it?” I said.
“Those guys stole my crackers.”
“The winos?”
“Yeah.”
I looked toward the steel drum. The flames had died down, and the three men were gone.
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“Oh, well,” I said. “Live and learn.”
“Bullshit. Drive around the neighborhood for a minute. I’m going to find those bastards, and I’m going to arrest their sorry asses.”
“What are you going to charge them with?” I asked. “Graham theft?”
I laughed again, eased into the late night traffic on West Addison Street. Herb was still pouting about the crackers when I dropped him at his door.
COLT
FRIDAY, 8:56 A.M. EST
People generally look after their own best interests. It’s a flaw in the human species, a glitch. It starts the day you’re born, and it ends the day you die. It’s the reason emotions like jealousy exist.
Greed.
Envy.
Hatred.
It’s the reason wars are fought.
If you ever find someone who truly and consistently cares about what happens to you, someone who loves you unconditionally, someone who would take a bullet for you without giving it a second thought, then you need to cling to that person like paint on a wall. It’s very unlikely you’ll ever run across anyone like that again.
Fifteen and a half years ago, I crawled from the wreckage of a chartered jet seconds before everyone who mattered to me went up in a ball of flames. My wife Susan, our baby daughter Harmony, my band Colt .45, everyone. I was the sole survivor, and there was nothing I could do to save them.
Susan was the love of my life, my soul mate. There would never be another, I’d thought at the time. But was it possible for a guy like me to have gotten lucky twice? And did I even have what it took to fully commit to a woman again?
It’s the kind of thing you think about when you wake up too early and stare at the ceiling for a couple of hours.
I reached over to the bedside table and shut my cell phone’s alarm off. Edgar, my girlfriend’s big furry gray cat, had been lying there on the table blinking at me lazily, nonchalantly, but the abrupt trill startled him. He jumped down and darted out the bedroom door.
“Scaredy cat,” I said, talking to myself as much as to the animal.
“Five more minutes,” Laurie said.
“I thought you wanted to get up at nine.”
“Five more minutes.”
I grabbed the phone, climbed out of bed, started toward the kitchen to make a pot of coffee and op
en a can of 9 Lives.
And that’s when the call came.
“This is Colt,” I said.
“Hello? Is anyone there?”
Female. Older. Smoker. Possibly hard of hearing.
“I’m here,” I said.
“Is this Nicholas Colt, the private investigator?”
“Allegedly.”
She started coughing into my ear, finally got it under control and said, “My name’s Doris Green. I tried the number you have listed in the phone book all day yesterday, but I kept getting an answering machine. I was just lucky to have—”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve been away from the office for a few days.”
The office was a 1964 Airstream Safari travel trailer parked on lot twenty-seven at Joe’s Fish Camp in Hallows Cove, Florida. Laurie lived in Jacksonville, thirty miles northeast of there, and I’d been staying at her apartment more and more over the past few months. We were living together, technically, although the camper on Lake Barkley was still a nice place to have.
“I have a very serious problem,” Doris Green said. “I was wondering if you might be able to help me.”
“I might be able to. What’s your problem?”
Emphysema? Chronic bronchitis? Lung cancer?
“I’d rather not discuss it over the phone,” she said. “Would it be possible for us to meet somewhere in person?”
“Sure. But could you just give me a general idea of what you’re talking about?”
“I’m talking about murder,” she said.
DANIELS
FRIDAY, 8:06 A.M. CST
During the wee hours of the morning, Brenda Shipman, Dr. William Shipman’s wife, had started making some phone calls. Eventually, she’d been put in touch with the Medical Examiner. Some of the cops around here jokingly refer to that grim little office as The Price is Right, because they’re always telling people to come on down. Brenda made the trip across town to positively identify her husband. Birthmark here, tattoo there, and that was that.
William Howard Shipman had bled to death. Exsanguination, they call it. No big surprise there. His left femoral artery had been completely severed, and he’d probably bled out in less than two minutes. There was an ATM receipt for two hundred dollars in his right front pants pocket, dated yesterday at 9:38 P.M., along with a dinner tab from Genario’s, which he’d paid for with a credit card. His nose, ears, and lips and been removed perimortem, as suggested by histamine levels in the wounds and the amount of bleeding, so he had probably still been alive when the cutting began, but likely unconscious—the reason he had no cuts on his hands from defending himself.
No DNA under his fingernails. No trace evidence from the perp. Whoever killed Dr. Shipman had done so quickly and cleanly.
I’d learned all that from the ME’s office, and I’d learned a few other things from the duty sergeant who’d interviewed Mrs. Shipman, like what time her husband usually left work every evening and why he’d been out so late last night.
Benedict and I sat in my office at the twenty-sixth district station house, mulling things over. We’d drained two pots of coffee already, working on a third.
Herb still had half a pack of marshmallows left, which he worked his way through with the consistency of a horse strapped to a feedbag.
“Statistically speaking, it was probably his wife,” he said.
“Told him she wanted to have sex in a dark, gross alley, lured him out of the car, then cut off his face. Doesn’t seem likely.”
“Maybe she was trying to save face?” Herb suggested.
I sighed. “Go ahead. Get all the jokes out of your system.”
“She defaced him.”
I winced. “Ouch.”
“She was a hockey fan. She loved the face-offs.”
“That one is pushing it.”
“She wanted him dead, but still wanted to be able to sit on his face.”
“That’s just… gross.”
“It was for her Facebook page.”
“Do you just sit around and think of these things instead of doing police work?”
“The thief was a plastic surgeon. It was a literal facelift.”
“You mean lift as in steal? That’s really stretching the boundaries of bad puns.”
“All puns are bad. Especially when presented with prima facie evidence.”
“And now you’re done,” I said. “Let’s get back on track trying to solve this.”
Herb popped in another marshmallow. “I still like the wife. She could have hired someone to do it.”
Normally, I would have agreed. Most murders are carried out by personal acquaintances. Friends, relatives, business partners, lovers. If someone’s going to kill you, it’s probably someone you know. But I didn’t think that was the case this time.
“She could have put a contract out on him,” I said. “But so messy?”
“She could have hated him. Maybe he was cheating on her.”
“Then she would have cut off something else. What kind of hitman cuts off people’s faces?”
“We’ve heard of guys that have done worse.”
We had, but this didn’t have that vibe. There was something about this murder that seemed both random and premeditated at the same time.
“A robbery gone bad?” Herb asked. “Victim of opportunity?”
“I like that more than a hitman. But what went bad, exactly? Seems like the perp killed Shipman pretty easily, and he got the wallet.”
We’d kept eyes on Shipman’s credit cards, but they hadn’t been used since being stolen. A pro would have run up thousands of dollars in charges by now.
“Why didn’t he take the car?” Herb asked. “If the motive was robbery, that Benz was worth forty K.”
“Amateur. Maybe he didn’t know any chop shops.”
“Or maybe the perp couldn’t drive.”
Another possibility.
“Gang initiation?” Herb asked.
“Kill a rich guy, bring back his face as proof?” I mulled it over. “That’s not bad. Let’s ask the gang unit, see if anyone on the street is doing that.”
The phone on my desk rang. It was the owner of the CigsMart where the murder had occurred, letting me know the security videos were ready for me to take a look at. I grabbed my coat and scarf and headed that way, leaving Benedict to finish up our initial report for Captain Bains.
“I should be back soon,” I said.
“I’m almost out of marshmallows. Can you grab some for me?”
“How about a healthier alternative?”
“Do they have marshmallows shaped like vegetables?”
I almost mentioned that if the defacer perp attacked Herb, he’d likely get a hernia trying to make off with my partner’s triple chin. But I’m nicer than that, so I just told Herb he was an idiot and left.
COLT
FRIDAY, 9:22 A.M. EST
Doris Green and I agreed to meet at Kelly’s Pool Hall in Hallows Cove. Laurie padded into the kitchen just as I was hanging up. She didn’t look happy.
“It’s twenty minutes after nine,” she said. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“Sorry. I got a call. Lost track of the time.”
She hugged me, gave me a long good morning kiss.
“It’s okay,” she said, smiling. “I really didn’t want to go to that job interview this morning anyway.”
“You didn’t?”
“Well, everyone should have a hobby, I guess. But, as you know, I’m independently wealthy, so it’s not like I need the money or anything.”
Laurie had been tending bar in a club called Yesterday’s, but the manager there had recently been forced to cut back on staff. I’d been helping her out with the rent, but we were both starting to get low on cash.
“At least one of us is gainfully employed,” I said.
“You have a job?”
“That’s what the call was about. The client wants me to meet her down in Hallows Cove. She wouldn’t give me any details over the
phone. Something about a murder.”
Laurie walked over to the other side of the counter, started loading some coffee grounds into the filter basket.
“Sounds intriguing,” she said.
“Want to come?”
“No, I wouldn’t want to cramp your style. Anyway, I better keep looking for job opportunities. Think you’ll be gone long?”
“Not too long.”
We chatted for a while and drank some coffee, and then I took a shower and got dressed and headed out. Before I left, as we were standing at the door saying goodbye, Laurie ran her tongue along the left side of my neck, collarbone to earlobe, and asked me if I wanted to sauce the white Fiesta.
Our code phrase for making love.
Long story.
I wanted to, but I was running late for my appointment.
“Hold that thought,” I told her. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
The air conditioner in my 1996 GMC Jimmy hadn’t worked for a while, and now the automatic window on the driver’s side was stuck in the up position. Better up than down, I told myself, but it made for an uncomfortable ride with the Florida sun beaming down. At least it was only supposed to get up to eighty today. I opened the vent and cracked the other windows and made do, thinking I would have to get the work done sometime before we got too far into spring.
I made it to Kelly’s around ten forty-five. Doris Green was at the bar, sitting several stools over from a pair of early birds who’d probably been sipping shots of rotgut since the place opened at eight. I walked up and introduced myself, asked her if she would be more comfortable at one of the tables along the wall.
“That would be fine,” she said.
Doris got a refill on her coffee, and I ordered a bottle of Dos Equis. We walked over and sat across from each other at the table by the jukebox. It was the most private spot at that time of the morning.
“How long have you lived in Hallows Cove?” I said.
“My husband and I retired down here several years ago. We’re originally from Illinois, little town called Quincy.”
“You like it here?”
“It was nice when Morris and I were together. Unfortunately, I’m alone now. He passed away a little over a year ago.”
“Sorry for your loss,” I said. “And you think your husband was murdered?”