A Passing Curse (2011) (17 page)

“To keep from contaminating the evidence?” Thomkins said.

“To keep my hands clean.”

Thomkins fetched a new pair of tan latex gloves from the back of a patrol car. Reese put them on, pulling the cuffs high and snapping them into place. Not a lot of protection. The latex let you feel everything, a second skin you could peel off, but part of you always came away with it, part of you always went into the trash with whatever was on the outside of the gloves. The Chief looked on but said nothing.

He knelt beside the body. Cheevy looked remarkably good for a dead person. His skin showed none of death’s blue mottling. In fact, the face was as white as it had been yesterday. Where was the floppy hat?

There was no blood or swelling or bruising to suggest that Cheevy had been alive when his head glanced off the dumpster and tore a jagged line across his forehead. He felt along the edges of the cut and peeled back the skin. No blood.

He rolled up Cheevy’s frilly white shirt. The veins in his arms had collapsed. The only other mark he could see, besides the cut, was a circular stamp of blue, very feint, the color of a meat inspector’s stamp, two inches wide, at the right side of the neck. He turned the head. Under the left ear he noticed two faint puncture marks, depressions really.

The skin was cold, almost as if Cheevy had been standing in the snow, outside, all his life. He remembered Cheevy, the emptiness in his eyes, as if he’d known immediately that Reese had brought nothing but trouble.

“What do you think?” Thomkins asked. He stood ready with a pen and notebook. “Time of death? Looks like somebody whacked him on the head. Would that have killed him?”

He let the head drop and thought of all the sounds the dead made. Empty sounds. Dream sounds. The rustle of clothes against the plastic bag. The hollow, thudding inside the black van.

Suffocating sounds. Later, the hog brush and water jets.

“Did some one hit him?” Thomkins asked. “Are you okay?”

Reese looked up. Thomkins there with his pen raised. “See the scuff marks on his clothes where he was dragged across the asphalt and the bunched-up collar where the person dragging him held on? See those short tire skids? There’s at least twenty feet between the front and back tires, so it was a big car, maybe a pick-up. They threw his head against the dumpster hard enough to break the skin but there’s no bruise, no blood. His veins have collapsed because he’s blood empty. No blood here means he wasn’t killed here.”

Thomkins knelt behind Cheevy’s head and sighted in on the imaginary car. Four uniformed police officers were standing around with crossed arms. Nearly half the force, he guessed. Two were smoking. The same faces he’d seen for years at crime scenes. Dull faces, drones trying to slug their way through thirty years, some of them slowly going crazy, waiting for the trapdoor pension at the end. Why were people surprised that more cops shot themselves than were shot on duty?

He looked at the skid marks again, the angle of body drag. He asked Thomkins to measure the tracks. He stretched out his tape. “A little over seven and a half feet wide.”

He thought limousine, possibly an older car, a boat, a sternwheeler. Nobody made cars that wide anymore, even SUV’s were small in comparison. He made a mental note of it but did not tell Thomkins.

Thomkins mentioned a witness. Lung Butter Bill had found the body and flagged down a passing cop.

Thomkins pointed to the man sitting in the back of a patrol car, the same guy he’d seen crawling out of the dumpster yesterday. Bill seemed to be having a good time hawking spit out the window. A pastel of greens and milky yellows spotted the asphalt.

He opened the front passenger’s door and slid in. Even with a cross wind, he smelled old socks, a moldy putridness, the perfume of bad wine. “His head woke you up?” Bill turned. His eyes a dirty green. The veins in his nose, scraggly and varicose. “When the victim’s head hit the dumpster, you woke up?”

“That his head?”

“Tell me what you saw?”

“I thought it was Dirty Steve.”

“Who?”

“Just a bum. He’s got a plate in his head and claims he can walk on his own water. Talk is he used to be a policeman who went on the sauce.”

“But it wasn’t Dirty Steve?”

“Nope. It was that kid that worked in the store. Not a bad kid. Throw maybe half a pizza out most nights and kept it neat in the box. Not a bad kid at all.”

“Anyone else around?”

Lung Butter Bill shrugged. “Nope.” Bill wasn’t much of a talker. He wasn’t much of a liar, either, Reese thought, and removed a twenty dollar bill from his wallet and put it on the top of the seat. Bill tucked the twenty away and rummaged deep in the pockets of his wasted coat. He held up a pair of plastic fangs. Halloween stuff, but real looking, the gums bright red.

“I found these.”

The points of the long incisors were tinted dark brown. “Where?” The distance between the fangs equaled that of the punctures under Cheevy’s ear. Of course it did. “You searched the body?”

“No. They was on the ground. In plain sight.”

He turned the fangs over in his fingers. Maybe some of Cheevy’s buddies had played their vampire games a little too rough. “You got any ideas?”

Lung Butter Bill cackled. “You think, sonny, maybe I could use those teeth to chew meat again?” Reese put the teeth in his jacket and got out of the car. Lung Butter Bill kept cackling.

The Chief came up. “What’s your verdict?”

“He’s been on ice.”

“On ice. What ice?”

“In a cooler. He can’t have been killed more than twelve hours ago because that’s when I saw him. It’s been warm all day, it’s still warm. In these temperatures a body loses, at the most, one degree per hour, but his skin is ice cold. He’s been in a freezer. He’s been on ice.”

The Chief thought about this while chewing on his thumb and looking from Reese to the body, as if trying to figure how Reese had killed him

“How did you know?” Reese asked.

“How did I know what?”

“I’d talked to Cheevy?”

“Thomkins saw you.”

“Tailing me?” He didn’t think Thomkins was that good. He would have spotted a tail. “Then he must have also seen Cheevy heading for the mansion, heading for Ajax.”

“No one is tailing you. Thomkins was driving by and saw you walk into the store. He didn’t see Cheevy heading anywhere. You were the last person seen with Cheevy. I’ve also got the kids’ statements who were in the store. You going to tell me why?”

“Why I killed him?”

The Chief hooked his thumbs into his belt. “If you want.”

Reese ignored him. He wanted to be with Rusty, but everything, especially romance, was timing and that time, at least for today, was gone. There was always tomorrow and the thought of that perked him up, slightly. “Did you know I have my own card? I’m featured as the man who killed the Anaheim Vampire.”

“You must be proud.”

“It’s nice to be appreciated.”

The Chief stepped closer to him, a slight smile on his face like they were buddies or maybe that Reese had something important to tell him “You going to tell me who killed him?”

“You think I know?” He knew one thing. He’d talked to Cheevy about Ajax and now Cheevy was dead. Earlier, he’d been sure that Ajax had wanted Cheevy to tell him something. Then why kill your messenger? Was Ajax beyond his imagination?

“I think you have an idea.”

The bar, a mahogany pier with brass rails, was empty except for a bartender polishing glasses. It was after one. Ajax had read her mind: She hadn’t liked being alone in the room with him. They decided on brandy. Martells. The bartender brought huge snifters. Ajax listened while she finished describing the two skeletons. She left out a few details.

“Tell me about the stakes,” he said at last.

“Two stakes. Hammered through the hearts. Suicides were buried outside of consecrated ground, suicides were staked.”

“Did Ramon destroy the first skeleton or did the bones deteriorate on their own?” Ajax asked. He had not touched his brandy.

“You know anything about it?”

“How would I?” Ajax said, raising his eyebrows as if she’d touched a nerve, as if she’d actually accused him of not telling her everything. “Will it be difficult to determine identity?”

“Whose identity?”

“The skeletons, of course.”

“Their names, you mean?”

“Is it possible?”

It was as if Ajax already knew who they were and was afraid she would find out or already had. “They didn’t carry ID’s, the Indians.”

Ajax shrugged. “Gender and age?”

“Females, I think, between fifteen and twenty. I’m using length of femur and lack of joint erosion to determine age. It’s a loose calculation. They were definitely Indian, definitely female.”

He nodded slowly. It seemed he was trying to discover exactly how much she knew or had guessed. Discover what she’d discovered. “You didn’t find anything extra?”

“Extra?”

“Besides the bones.”

“Nothing extra,” she lied. Ajax had not touched his brandy. She finished hers and signaled the bartender. He glided to the table, replaced her empty glass with another, and bowed slightly before leaving. The bar towel over his arm smelled of bleach.

She took a small sip. Ajax had not taken his eyes off of her face for almost a minute. Was he asleep? His eyes were clear black and without depth. She’d seen rocks with more life. “You’ve lived in Santa Marina for a while?”

“Do you mind if I call you Penelope? I like Rusty, it’s solid if a bit provincial, but Penelope seems more…poetic. It’s a charming, old fashioned name.”

“It’s my name.” Her father, a pathological academic, had named her after Ulysses’ wife. He said it had come to him the moment he saw her in the delivery room. Even as a child, he was fond of saying, she’d had a certain air of wisdom and loyalty. Her father had been a Homer scholar of some renown, a Princeton professor given, at times, to spontaneous and lengthy recitals of Homer’s Odyssey, some of which he made up. Probably what had driven her mother off. “Use it if you want.”

“Good. To answer your question, I was born here. I’ve been here forever, it seems.”

“One of your ancestors was a Spanish Don?”

“Yes, his brother, my great-great-great uncle, was a priest. Father Delgado. He built the mission. Father Delgado was the reason the mission exists.”

“What about the Balkans? Romania? Any family there?”

She caught a look of caution. A flicker. “Why do you ask?”

“Just curious. You have a face….” She wasn’t sure how to put it, how to tell him he matched a Romanian knight carved on a casket.

“Yes?”

“You look like people in the Balkans, that’s all. Dark. Slavic.”

Ajax rolled the brandy. Sniffed at it as if he’d just realized it was in his hand. “I’ve heard that before. But all my people, as far as I know, are from Spain and Scotland. I’m positive I have no relations in Eastern Europe. There could be a trace of the Hasidic Jew in my blood, according to legend. That may account for the look.”

“But you’ve been there?”

“Many, many years ago.”

“In Romania,” she said. “After the fight with the soldiers, after they killed the guide, after they tried to rape and kill me, I passed out in the snow.”

“You told me on the phone. Again, I apologize. It must have been dreadful. In retrospect, I should have sent a platoon of bodyguards with you.”

“I told you someone carried me back under the castle and put me inside the coffin, and called the police, anonymously. This good Samaritan also bandaged my head.” She did not mention that her benefactor had then decapitated three soldiers. “But when the guide and I drove to the castle, there were no tracks in the snow, the ice over the creek was solid.”

“There must have been another way in.”

“The guide, Radu, said not. Whoever saved me had been there for awhile, at least overnight. Had been waiting for us is what I’m thinking.”

“Waiting?” Ajax asked, but in his eyes she saw that he knew exactly who’d helped her. “A hunter perhaps? Trapper? Not waiting for you, I think, just there. A happy coincidence.”

“Whoever it was, I’d like to thank him,” she said. Ajax nodded strangely and looked away. She wondered if she just had. “Doesn’t it strike you as odd that I went to Romania to look for vampires and now I’m in Santa Marina up to my neck in the same thing?”

“The same thing? I don’t understand.”

“Stakes and bones turning to dust. It has the vampire ring to it.”

Ajax paused. “As for the peculiar state of the remains, Father Ramon could have imagined a skin instead of bones. As for the stakes, you said it yourself, the remains could have been suicides.”

“Yes,” she said, “they could have been suicides and they could have been something else.”

“Something else?”

“In Romania, the Orthodox church makes a habit of checking graves, the bodies, three or four years after burial. They note the condition of the corpse and if it still looks fresh, they hammer a stake in the heart.”

He did not smile. “That is absurd.”

She did not feel like arguing. She pushed her chair back. “Thanks for the drink, Ajax. I’ve an early morning.” It was as good an excuse as any to get away from him.

“Shall I walk you to your room?”

A thought struck her: How bad did Ajax want her here? What was he up to? “I’d like a contract. Something in the form of a legal contract. Something to keep us both honest.”

His ears perked up. “Contract?”

“Your promise to sponsor the Alexander dig, with a pay-or-play clause. I want five hundred thousand dollars if we don’t start work in one month, and if we do start, I want the same amount up front.”

“Start digging in a month?”

“No. Start planning. A serious look at what we need.”

He didn’t even blink. “I’ll have a contract ready within the week. But why quibble? I should think an even million would be appropriate, a woman of your qualities.”

13

He woke at seven and knocked off fifty push-ups. He scrambled his last three eggs and ate them with the single remaining sausage link. He drank his last beer, the reserve can he kept in the vegetable bin.

“Call me tomorrow,” was the last thing she’d said. He knew three things about her. She was pretty. She was sexy. She was smart. She was tough. She was working for Ajax Rasmussen. She was…yes, she was very hot. Five things.