Brain Drain

by Warren Murphy

  Brain Drain

  The Destroyer #22

  Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir

  For Phil and the future,

  both promising.

  CHAPTER ONE

  JUST OUTSIDE THE DOOR, a rookie patrolman let go of his coffee and cigarette breakfast, all over his blue uniform, then retched up solids from the day before. He could not enter the basement room in Greenwich Village. A New York City detective sergeant helped him back up the iron steps to street level.

  Inside the room, a city coroner slipped on the blood and half–flipped onto his back. Getting up, he skidded in the oozing red that had washed over what might once have been a robin’s–egg blue rug. The back of his checkered coat was soaked dark where he had landed. His knees, where he had leaned, were red pads. His hands were red, and he couldn’t use his notebooks. The room smelled like the inside of a cow’s belly. Excrement and intestines.

  Manhattan’s chief of homicide detectives, Jake Waldman, saw the young patrolman outside, dry–heaving over a fire hydrant, with one of his detectives holding him steady.

  “Too much for the kid?” asked Inspector Waldman.

  “Too much for anyone,” said the detective.

  “A stiff’s a stiff. Only the living hurt you,” said Inspector Waldman to the rookie, who nodded respectfully between heaves. The detective nodded, too.

  He had once seen Waldman talking away in a room with a month–old stiff that would have made a rhinoceros gag, the cigar bouncing around his lips, while other men left because they had to get a breath of breathable air or go insane. Waldman had a stomach of boilerplate iron. He would eat pastrami sandwiches, dripping with delicatessen cole slaw, in the city morgue and wonder why other people thought this peculiar.

  When Willie “Grapes” Riggi got it with two Bren guns all over his face at Gigliotti’s Clam House on Mulberry Street, a coroner found a trace of potato salad and mustard in what was left of the eye socket and commented that Waldman must have seen the body already. He had.

  “Tomato juice and pickles, kid. It’ll fix you right up,” said Inspector Waldman, his thick square face nodding with fatherly concern, his cigar bobbing up and down for emphasis.

  At this, the rookie cop flailed wildly in another dry heave.

  “What’d I say?” asked Waldman. People were always reacting strangely.

  He was glad the press wasn’t here yet. Television had its own crazy rules. He had been a detective when TV news was first coming in, and one day he’d seen a departmental directive ordering that “such detectives and other police personnel shall not, repeat NOT, consume candy bars or any other sweets, nourishments, condiments, or beverages at homicide scenes, since television reportage of the above–said masticatory acts tends to promote an image of departmental insensitivity toward the deceased.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” young Waldman had asked a full detective sergeant. He knew that good police writing could be measured by how many times a person had to use a dictionary to decipher it. It would be years before he could write like that, let alone speak to reporters like that.

  “It means, Waldy, that you shouldn’t have eaten that potato knish over that mutilated nun’s body in front of the television cameras yesterday.”

  Waldman had shrugged. He never had understood Catholicism too well. Now, years later, watching the rookie struggle for air over the hydrant, he was glad the television cameras hadn’t arrived yet. He had just bought a fresh, salted pretzel and he didn’t want it to get cold in his pocket.

  Waldman saw the coroner stumble up the steps leading from the basement, his hands and knees bloodied, his eyes wide in shock.

  “Hey, get a doctor,” yelled Waldman to the detective helping the rookie.

  “Doctors have been here and left,” the detective yelled back. “They’re all dead inside.”

  “We’ve got a hurt man here. The coroner,” said Waldman.

  “It’s not my blood,” said the coroner.

  “Oh,” said Waldman. He saw a press car weave behind the police barricade down the street and quickly finished his pretzel, stuffing the last chunk into an already–full mouth. He just wouldn’t talk for a minute, that was all.

  Going down the iron steps, he saw the coroner had left bloody footprints. The little cement well before the door smelled of fresh urine, despite the cold March rain of the day before. The small drain in the center of the well was clogged with the soot that collected in all open water in the city. The coroner had left bloody prints on the door. What was the matter with these people? This was a murder scene and you weren’t supposed to go touching things. Everyone was acting like rookies. Waldman poked the green, paint–chipped wooden door open, using the rubber end of a pencil. A large grain of salt from the pretzel caught in a lower right tooth. It hurt. It would disappear when he could get his mouth empty enough to suck it out.

  The door creaked open and Waldman stepped gingerly inside, looking to avoid the blood pools and chewing rapidly. There were no dry islands. The floor rippled with human blood, a small wall–to–wall lake, slippery red. A white 150–watt bulb suspended from the ceiling was reflected in the red slick. To his right, a head looked dumbly up at him from a couch pillow, its right ear just a dark hole near a bloody temple. A pile of bloody pants seemed entangled under a small wrought–iron table at the far end of the room. Waldman looked closer. There was no body attached to them. Closer. It was three legs. Different shoes. Three different shoes. At least three deaths.

  The room smelled of released body smells, with an overtone of sticky–sweet hashish. But it was not the smell that did it.

  Waldman stopped chewing and spat the pretzel out of his mouth.

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh. Wow. Oh.”

  He had seen the walls. Cement block covered with random psychedelic posters. A kid’s pad, or an artist’s. But no pad in Greenwich Village ever had walls like this, walls that dripped small lines of blood. Walls with holes that human arms stuck out from, right near the ceiling. It looked as if the walls had arms. A pinky was contracted on an arm that had only ceiling molding for an armpit.

  Death was death, and raw death was raw death, but this stepped beyond. Not in his years of picking floaters out of the East River or even bodies from garbage dumps where rats gnawed their way inside to feast had he seen something like this. Death was death. But this? And above the doorway in the plaster ceiling, were embedded the blood–drained trunks of four bodies. Three male. One female.

  The room darkened, and Waldman felt himself becoming light, but he kept his balance and made his way out the door again, where he breathed deep the blessed stench of natural city air. Years of training and using his common sense took over. He got the police photographers in and out quickly, warning them beforehand that they had a horror ahead of them and that they should do their job as quickly, and especially as mechanically, as they could. The photographs would place the parts of bodies where they had been in the room. He personally tagged limb and head and random organs on a large chart of the room. He placed a limp eyeball in a clear polyfilm bag and labeled it. He got two detectives to question people in the building, another to track down the landlord. He had interns from nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital help detectives to un–wedge the remnants of people from the walls and ceiling.

  The butchered pieces were brought to the morgue. It was when they tried to reassemble the bodies for identification, which he knew by sight would be impossible—only fingerprints and dental work could identify these leavings—that he discovered the other beyond–reason element in a slaughter he had already stamped in his mind as beyond reason. The chief coroner was the first to point it out.

  “Your people forgot to pick up something.”

 
“What?”

  “Look at the skulls.”

  The brains had been scraped out. “It was such a mess in there,” said Waldman.

  “Yeah. But where are the brains?”

  “They must be here,” said Waldman.

  “Your people get everything?” asked the coroner.

  “Yeah. We’re even cleaning up now.”

  “Well, the brains are missing.”

  “They’ve got to be here somewhere. What about those bags full of gook?” asked Waldman.

  “The gook, as you call it, includes everything but the brains.”

  “Then that organ of the deceased bodies was transported from the premises of the homicide by the perpetrator,” said Waldman.

  “That’s right, Inspector,” said the coroner. “Somebody took the brains.”

  · · ·

  At the press conference Inspector Waldman had to tell a Daily News reporter three times that the organs of the deceased that were missing were not the organs that the reporter thought they were. “Brains, if you really want to know,” said Waldman.

  “Shit,” said the Daily News reporter. “There goes a great story. Not that this isn’t good. But it could have been great.”

  Waldman went home to his Brooklyn apartment without having dinner. Thinking about the homicide, he had trouble sleeping. He had thought he had seen it all, but this was beyond… beyond… beyond what? Not reason, really. Reason had patterns. Someone, obviously with power tools, had taken apart human beings. That was a pattern. And the removal of the brains, no matter how disgusting, was a pattern. The arms in the walls, but not the legs, were part of the pattern. And so were the trunks of the bodies.

  It must have taken a good two hours to whack out the crevices in the ceiling and the walls and to insert the bodies properly. But where were the tools? And if it did take two hours or even an hour, why was there only one set of bloody footprints when he had entered? The rookie cop had taken one look at the doorway and been escorted up by a detective. The first doctors to arrive had just looked inside the room and made a blanket pronouncement of death. Only the coroner’s footprints were on the stairs when Waldman went in. How had the killer or killers left without leaving bloody footprints?

  “Hey, Jake, come to bed,” said Waldman’s wife.

  Waldman looked at his watch. It was 2:30 A.M.

  “At this hour, Ethel?”

  “I mean to sleep,” said his wife. “I can’t sleep without you near me.”

  So Inspector Jake Waldman slid under the quilt with his wife, felt her snuggle to him, and stared at the ceiling.

  Assuming the homicides were rational, because of the pattern, what was the reason for the pattern? Arms in walls and bodies in ceilings. Brains removed.

  “Hey, Jake,” said Mrs. Waldman.

  “What?”

  “If you’re not going to sleep, get out of bed.”

  “Make up your mind,” said Waldman.

  “Go to sleep,” said Ethel.

  “I am. I’m thinking.”

  “Stop thinking and go to sleep.”

  “How do you stop thinking?”

  “You drop dead already.”

  Jake Waldman sucked the last small fragment of salt from his right lower molar.

  In the morning, Ethel Waldman noticed that her husband didn’t touch the bagels, only picked at the lox with onions and eggs, and hardly bothered to sip his cup of tea.

  “There’s something wrong with the food already?” she asked.

  “No. I’m thinking.”

  “Still thinking? You were thinking last night. How long are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “You don’t like my eggs.”

  “No. I like your eggs.”

  “You like my eggs so much you’re letting them turn to stone.”

  “It’s not your eggs. I’m thinking.”

  “There’s another woman,” said Ethel Waldman.

  “Woman, shwoman, what other woman?” asked Waldman.

  “I knew it. There’s someone else,” said Ethel Waldman. “Someone who doesn’t ruin her nails cooking for you or get wrinkles worrying about how to make you happy. Some little street chippie with cheap perfume and a young set of boobs who doesn’t care beans about you like I care. I know.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I hope you and that cheap tart you’re running around with are very happy. Get out of here. Get out of here.”

  “C’mon, Ethel, I got problems.”

  “Get out of here, animal. Go to your whore. Go to your whore.”

  “I’ve got work. I’ll see you tonight, Ethel.”

  “Get out. Out, animal.”

  And in the hallway of the fifth floor of their apartment building, Jake Waldman heard his wife yell out to the world:

  “Lock up your daughters, everyone. The whore–master’s on the loose.”

  At the division headquarters, there was a phone call waiting for Inspector Waldman. It was Ethel. She would do anything to patch up their marriage. They should try again. Like adults. She would forget the incident with the actress.

  “What actress? What incident?”

  “Jake. If we’re trying again, let’s at least be honest.”

  “All right, all right,” said Waldman, who had been through this before.

  “Was she a famous actress?”

  “Ethel!”

  And that held the family problems for the day. The mayor’s office wanted a special report and the commissioner’s office wanted a special report and some agency in Washington wanted some kind of report for a special study and a psychologist from Wayne State University wanted to talk to Waldman, so Inspector Waldman hauled the lowest grade detective he saw first and gave him an assignment.

  “Keep those dingbats off my back,” he said.

  The police photographers had come up with something interesting. Perhaps Waldman had missed it during the rush to finish up the on–the–scene work. But could he make out a certain poster on the wall through the lines of blood? Right under that arm there?

  “Hmmmm,” said Waldman.

  “What do you think?” asked the photographer.

  “I think I’m going back to that basement. Thank you.”

  “Crazy, huh?” said the photographer.

  “No. Reasonable,” said Waldman.

  There were knots of people around the basement apartment, both attracted but kept at a distance by the police barricades. The rookie had apparently recovered well because he looked professional and bored standing in front of the iron steps leading to the basement.

  “I told you it was nothing, kid,” commented Waldman going down the steps.

  “Yeah, nothing,” said the rookie cockily.

  “You’ll be picking up eyeballs in polyfilm bags in no time and thinking nothing of it, kid,” said Waldman, noticing the rookie double over and run toward the curb. Funny kid.

  The basement room now smelled like a sharp commercial disinfectant. The rug was gone and the floor was scrubbed, but much of the brown stain could not be scrubbed away. It had soaked into the wooden floor. That was strange. Basement apartments usually had cement floors. Waldman hadn’t noticed the construction before because of the blood. Funny how much new blood was like oil, a slippery coating when first spilled.

  Waldman took the photograph out of the manila envelope, tearing off the little silver snap that went through the hole in the flap. The disinfectant rose beyond smell. It was a taste now. Like swallowing a mothball.

  The glossy photograph reflected the harsh light from the bulb overhead. The room felt surprisingly cool, even for a basement. He looked at the photograph, then looked at the wall. The wall posters had been scraped during the cleaning process and now were only barely discernible strips.

  But he had the photograph. And between the photograph and the small strips left on the wall, he saw it. On the wall there had been a surrealistic poster of a room. And from the walls of that room hung arms. And
in the ceilings were trunks of bodies. And looking at the photograph of what the poster had been and at the remnants of the poster now, Inspector Waldman saw that the room had been made into a replica of this mad poster. Almost exactly in proportion to the picture. It was an imitation of the picture. He stepped back on the creaking floor. An exact, proportional, almost slavish imitation. He felt something about this, and his instinct told him it was important. What was it?

  Waldman looked down at the photograph again. Sure. That was it. There was no deviation from the poster at all. The room had reproduced the horror of the poster exactly, almost as if the killer had been programmed to do it, almost as if he had no feelings of his own. It was as if a mindless ape had imitated art and created nothing but death.

  Of course, none of this could go in a report. He’d be laughed out of the department. But he wondered what sort of killers could remain calm enough to exactly copy a poster during the hysteria of mass murder. Probably a devil cult of some sort. In that case, there would be more of these, and the perpetrators were doomed. Almost anyone had a fair chance of getting away with something once. Sometimes twice. But something like this they would have to do again, and when they got to the third time, or maybe even the second, some circumstance, some accident of performance, some loose word somewhere, some left wallet, some random thing, like even a door locking behind them or being seen in the act, would get them. Time, not brilliance, was the law’s edge.

  Waldman stepped back. One of the boards on the floor was loose. The place shouldn’t have had a wooden floor anyhow. He stamped down hard on one end of the board. The other rose, like a brown–stained square tongue. He leaned down and ripped it up. It covered small plastic bags with oblong brown wads slightly smaller than Hershey bars. So that was the reason for the flooring. Waldman smelled the contents of a bag. Hashish. He kicked off the board next to the first. More bags. The basement was a stash. In rough estimates, he saw about thirty–five hundred dollars worth already. He kicked over another board. Where he had expected to find bags, Waldman saw an oblong tape deck, with a small dim yellow light in the control panel. The spool spun around and around, whipping a liver–colored end of tape against the gray plastic edge of a panel. He stared at it going around, the tape softly whipping the panel edge. He saw a black cord lead through a drilled hole in the wooden floor support. The machine was on record.