The Starr Sting Scale

by C. S. O'Cinneide

  “So, you think it’s a woman?”

  “No, Candace, I think it’s a cross-dressing homicidal maniac with freakishly small feet.”

  We start walking again.

  “Do you know anyone in the industry who fits that description?” Malone finally asks after a half a minute of saying nothing. Too bad: with my hangover, I’d really been enjoying the silence.

  “What description? The owner of a size-seven high heel?” I finish off the last of the gyro, wipe my face with the napkin it came with, and shove it in Malone’s coat pocket. I can feel her bristle when I reach in. “That’s not a description, that’s goddamn Cinderella.”

  “It appears a woman was with him before he died, and you know people in the business. There aren’t many females.”

  “What business?” I say, messing with her.

  “The business of dispatching two-timing Tidal Waves with a noose and a bottle of Valium.”

  “Listen, Malone, no professional in their right mind is going to truss up a target on a zip line. We’ve got our artistic pride, for Christ’s sake.” Uncle Rod used to say there should be a union, or at the very least a guild, which is like a union but it doesn’t go on strike or make people disappear like Jimmy Hoffa. “Did you discover anything besides a couple of dance steps in the dust?” I ask her.

  Malone waits for a moment and then she reaches into her purse for a small blue notebook. She must have got caught without her iPad.

  “Whoever was in there took a couple of harnesses.” She consults her notes. “A sit and a chest harness, along with some of those fasteners.” She squints at her own writing, trying to decipher it. “Carabiners,” she finally says, putting the notebook away. “The chest harness was orange. The owner gave me a duplicate, so we can try to match the fibres against what we found on Tyler’s body, and the lab …”

  “I still say it was suicide, Malone. The kid broke in and —”

  “No,” she says, cutting me off. “It wasn’t.”

  We’ve reached the front door of the school. The two of us start up the multiple steps to the stone-columned entranceway. An insignia is carved into the marble archway: Brassnose Academy, Provehito in altum. Something tells me the kids from the hood don’t go here.

  “Peyton says with the amount of Valium in that kid’s blood he couldn’t have tied his own shoelaces, let alone a noose to a zip line lanyard. He probably wouldn’t even have been able to stand up without assistance.”

  “Who’s Peyton?”

  “The pathologist!” she screams at me.

  I am beginning to love messing with Malone. When those jade eyes spark with the thwarted desire to throttle me, I can’t help but smile.

  Principal Cutter sits behind a huge mahogany desk that bears the scuff marks of a hundred kids’ sneakers on the side facing us. He’s a squat, pasty-looking guy with stick-out ears. A full head of hair, the colour courtesy of Grecian Formula, is about all he has going for him in the looks department. Malone and I sit in two hard chairs that appear to have been designed for toddlers. The room is so hot the back of my neck is starting to sweat, despite my upswept hair. On the walls are pictures of Cutter forcibly smiling at students who are accepting awards or shaking hands with him at graduation. I have been in my fair share of principals’ offices, and they are all the same. Intimidation mixed with a mandatory air of accessibility.

  “I’m sorry, what did you say your name was again?” Cutter has been eyeing me since we came in. He’s not buying Malone’s claim that I’m a PI on retainer. He knows a troublemaker when he sees one, having made a career in trying to rein them in.

  “Candace,” I say. I hope he doesn’t have access to my permanent record. While containing surprisingly good grades, it also has a suspension file several inches thick.

  “We want to hear about Tyler Brent, Mr. Cutter,” Malone says, jumping in. She’s taken off her London Fog in the heat and rolled up her shirt sleeves. Her forearms are sleek and tanned.

  “Yes, a terrible business. We are all very upset and shocked here at the Academy.” Cutter looks about as shocked as an old-hand whore asked for change.

  “What can you tell us about him?” Malone says.

  “Well, as you know, school records are confidential.”

  “He’s dead,” I say. “I don’t think he cares much now whether we know if he was flunking English or not.”

  “It would really help with our investigation,” Malone says, putting on her best winning smile. But Cutter is impenetrable to Malone’s charms.

  “I would have to get permission from the parents first, and of course the board, which doesn’t meet until the middle of next month.”

  “That’s a shame,” says Malone. “It would be just terrible if something were to happen to another student.” She sits back in the toddler chair and steeples her fingers in front of her. “And if we could have prevented it, you know, with the information, it would be such a shame. The press tends to jump on that kind of thing. I’d hate for the school to be painted as not co-operating — you know how lousy the press can be — or even held responsible for the second death of a student.”

  Cutter keeps his poker face, but there is a slight twitch to it ever since Malone said the word press.

  “Of course, I could give you my personal reflections on the student, just unofficially, without consulting his file. Would that be considered sufficiently co-operating?” He gives us much the same smile that he wears in the pictures on the wall, just as forced, but dripping with a whole lot more “fuck you.”

  “I believe that it would,” Malone says, unable to hide her satisfaction. She picks up her iPad to take notes. “What kind of student was he?”

  Cutter sighs and looks out the window, letting his guard down with the weariness only a person who has worked with the cesspool of adolescence for decades can muster. “The kind that doesn’t grace the school with his presence all that much.” He turns and faces us again. “I don’t think I ever saw him before one in the afternoon, if I did at all.” He pours himself a glass of water from a pitcher and takes a sip, not offering either of us anything as we sweat in his overheated office; a pound of flesh extracted for daring to breach his inner sanctum. “We had a special protocol in place for when he was here. If he became agitated. The staff had strict instructions not to engage with him.”

  “Agitated?” I say.

  “Yes, agitated,” Cutter repeats.

  “In what way would he become agitated?” Malone asks.

  “In the way where he would throw a math compass across the room, almost impaling a physics teacher’s neck.”

  “Oh,” I say. “That kind of agitated.”

  “Listen, I don’t know what to tell you. The boy was lazy, violent, and so full of self-entitlement he expected the ground to cough up cash for allowing him to walk on it.” He takes a long drink from his glass. I’m starting to wonder whether that pitcher only contains water. “I never understood what Alice Corrigan saw in him. She was a good student, a nice girl, before she got involved with him. After that …”

  “This is the girlfriend,” Malone says. The girlfriend, as opposed to the other girlfriend.

  “Yes. At first, I thought it was just a passing thing. A chance to walk on the wild side. A lot of girls like to get a taste of that when they’re young.” And some girls swallow it whole, I think, but keep my mouth shut for fear Malone will elbow me in the gut again. Plus, she warned me after the meeting with the parents. No more Tourette’s.

  “But then, it was as if she became obsessed with him. Talking him down from all his various dramas, following him around like an abused puppy. It was like she couldn’t breathe without him. A teacher caught her cutting class one day on her way to see him at home. When he told her to go back to class, she threw herself on the ground, kicking and screaming, crying hysterically that Tyler needed her. We had to sedate her in the nurse’s office. Apparently, Tyler had texted her to bring him a submarine sandwich. That young man knew the control he h
ad over her, and he used it to his best advantage.”

  “What did her parents think about that?” Malone asks. And I think about what the blonde said in The Goon that day. How the kid gave her daughter a disease. How he was ruining her chances for a good university. Sounds like he might have been ruining more than that.

  “I am not at liberty to discuss that,” Cutter says.

  “Can we talk with Alice?” Malone asks, and the principal bristles again.

  “Not without the express permission and presence of her parents. In any case, she is not in school today.”

  “Not in school?”

  “No. Understandably.”

  “Yes. Understandably,” Malone says. But I don’t think she can understand any better than me why a girl would mourn the death of a boy who used her as his own personal Uber Eats. “What about Lachlan Reid?” she asks, switching tacks to inquire after Tyler’s friend, the bad influence his parents told us about.

  “Lachlan Reid is also absent today,” Principal Cutter says, drumming his fingers on the green blotter of his mahogany desk. His hands are chubby and small, like a child’s.

  “His attendance record much like Tyler’s?”

  “Birds of a feather,” Cutter says. “But Lachlan is absent today for a separate reason.”

  “And that reason would be …?” Malone leads.

  “Suspension,” he spits out after a moment’s hesitation, abruptly quitting his impatient finger tapping. He uses his chubby little hand to grab the tumbler of water and down what’s left in one gulp, as if finishing the drink will also bring an end to the conversation. He’s tired of protecting students’ rights and just wants to get rid of us.

  “What did he do?” Malone asks.

  “He got in a fight last Friday.” Cutter pours himself another drink of water from the pitcher, coming to accept, perhaps, that we aren’t quite done with him. Malone and I sit sweltering in the overheated office, coming to accept that the pitcher probably doesn’t have water in it.

  “Who with?”

  “With Tyler Brent.” He spits out the boy’s name like he spit out the suspension. “Lachlan was hurt quite badly; maliciously, you might say. An ambulance had to be called.”

  “It sounds to me like you didn’t like Tyler Brent very much,” Malone says.

  He turns to her at first looking defiant, and then he sighs and starts rubbing his temples, standing down. I think this man may have once really believed in the importance of educating young people, but a guaranteed pension and nine hundred pubescent ingrates a year passing through his doors beat it out of him.

  “Listen, I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but that kid frightened the hell out of us,” Cutter says. “I’m not completely surprised he met with a violent end. And while I would never wish tragedy on a young person with their whole lives ahead of them …”

  “You think he deserved it,” I say.

  Cutter sighs again. “I think,” he says, taking another sip of the water-that-is-vodka, “that I have been doing this job for far too long.”

  Apparently, while we cannot look at Tyler Brent’s file, we can look in his locker. Lockers are school property and the administration can cut the locks off anytime and have a look inside. So much for individual rights.

  Malone and I take out Tyler’s textbooks one by one, flipping through the pages with our gloved fingers. I really should invest in whatever company supplies the police force with latex. They go through more of these gloves in a day than my dad used to go through shot glasses.

  “Here’s something,” I say, and point to a drawing on the back of a history book. It depicts an oversized dick with matching droopy balls. “It’s the fifth one I found. I thought maybe it represents a trend.”

  “Excellent detective work,” Malone says, starting to go through the notebooks, which have nothing in them, not even grotesque dicks. Just blank pages, wishing someone would write on them. “You’ve cracked the case.”

  “I didn’t think you were one for sarcasm, Malone.”

  “I didn’t think you were one to find badly drawn phalluses something to remark on.”

  “Listen, Malone,” I say, picking up Our World: A Connected Community of Life off the floor. “Do you have a problem with me?”

  “I just can’t believe you’re telling me you have no idea who would have been at that zip line shack with Tyler. You know everyone. That’s why I brought you in on this case. If you’re holding back on me, Candace, I swear I’ll …”

  “You’ll what?” I say, raising one eyebrow. But she just lets out a sigh of exasperation and goes back to the notebooks. She pulls out the last binder, along with a rotting banana, from the bottom of the locker. That’s everything. No phone.

  When I flip to the back of Our World, expecting to find more genitals, I discover something else: a slip of red-lined paper from a notebook. This one even has writing on it. But I don’t think it’s Tyler’s.

  “You know, Malone, I think you’ll find that murders are rarely the result of professionals.” I hold up the note from Alice Corrigan, hastily written on both sides in leaky purple pen. Or maybe her tears made the smudges. I dangle it in front of Malone. “Something tells me that in this case, you should probably be looking a hell of a lot closer to home.”

  “I’ll just stay here in the car.”

  “Like hell you will.” Malone turns around from the front seat, looking at me through the metal mesh. We’re in the driveway of Alice Corrigan’s neat, ranch-style house with way too many begonias in the front garden for my taste. Next to us is a Mercedes AMG, gleaming in the sun.

  “I don’t see how I can be any help with talking to this girl.”

  “You’ll provide a distinct perspective,” Malone says.

  “And what the fuck would that be?” I say, blowing a piece of hair out of my face.

  “The appreciation of what would drive a seventeen-year-old girl to threaten to cut off her boyfriend’s scrotum with a Bowie knife if she caught him cheating.”

  “C’mon, Malone, you never been in love?” The letter had been quite graphic. It seems that Alice had caught wind that there might be someone else mowing her grass and she wasn’t at all interested in sharing the lawn care. There was the usual “If I can’t have you, nobody can,” but shit, everyone says that. It’s like “It’s not you, it’s me” and “I swear, I never saw those boxer shorts/ that garter belt/that used cock ring before.” Something you just say in the moment.

  “Love’s not like that,” Malone says, leaning back in her seat and closing her eyes. I don’t think she slept at all last night. Probably worked through it, looking in to the zip line thing. She’s starting to lose her enthusiasm.

  “Isn’t it?” Most of the love I’ve seen, from my parents to the meth head and his girlfriend, has convinced me that love is just that. A big, explosive fucked-up mess of the human condition to be avoided at all costs.

  “No,” Malone says, her eyes still closed.

  “Are you married?” I really don’t want to go into the Corrigans’ house and risk seeing the blonde again. I’ll do anything to stall, even lullaby Malone to sleep with small talk.

  “I was engaged once,” she says.

  “And?” I say. I use an open question to keep her talking.

  “It was good. For a while. Until it wasn’t.”

  “Why?” I lean forward, so I can talk quietly right behind her ear. She has her hair tucked behind it, and I can see a tasteful pearl stud in the lobe through the mesh. A second piercing above the pearl is long grown over.

  “I don’t think he found me exciting enough.”

  “You’re a homicide detective, Malone.”

  “Yeah, go figure.” She smiles but doesn’t open her eyes. I can see her tired face in the rear-view. People say a smile isn’t real unless you can see it in the eyes, but Malone’s still looks like the real thing. It makes me want to smile myself. Infectious, that’s what they call that kind of smile Malone has, like it’s a disease. �
�My mom liked him,” she says, carrying on with the story but not the smile. “He was Chinese. Came from a good family. But he wanted different things in life than me. Designer labels, designer babies, everything brand name or brand new.”

  “And what did you want?” Before I was just trying to avoid going inside the Corrigans’ house, but now I actually want to know.

  “Someone to sit with at the end of the night. Someone to come home to. Someone to look at the screwed-up world with me from a distance, so we can stand apart from it. A perfect biosphere of two.”

  “That’s pretty deep, Malone.” It really is.

  “Yeah,” she says. “I guess he didn’t think so.” She opens her eyes, rubbing them with her fists.

  “What happened?”

  “One of my sorority sisters went down on him when she was visiting from Pennsylvania. I wasn’t going to believe her until I found her lipstick on his foreskin.”

  “A brand-name lipstick, I’m guessing?”

  She just shakes her head and gets out of the car, opening the back door for me.

  “Time to go, Candace. And this time, try to keep your mouth shut.”

  Damn, these cops just never fucking sleep.

  The dark-haired guy standing in the double doorway of the Corrigans’ house has an arrogant three-piece suit and an attitude to match.

  “Good evening, I’m Detective Malone.” She holds up her badge, but he doesn’t allow her to get any further with the introductions.

  “I know who you are,” he says, stepping onto the front stoop and closing the doors behind him. “I’m Alex Lopez, the Corrigans’ attorney.” He hands Malone a card. “I’m afraid the family cannot be disturbed today.”

  “We just want to ask a few questions,” Malone says through gritted teeth. The only people cops hate more than criminals are lawyers.

  “Well, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait,” Lopez says. “The Corrigans have had quite a shock. They’re concerned for their daughter’s emotional state.” I bet they are. If she needed to be sedated when she couldn’t bring Tyler a sub, I can’t imagine how fucked up she is over this.