Hell Hole (13 page)

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Authors: Chris Grabenstein

BOOK: Hell Hole
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“Oh,” says Slominsky. “That's a memorandum-type deal. One of the young kids in my department, this Stella Boonshoft chick, wasted all day yesterday tracking down what buses might've been on their way to and from Atlantic City Friday night when Shareef shot himself, or, you know, got himself shot. Either way, maybe one of those buses listed there stopped at exit fifty-two.”
Ceepak taps the paper. “Yes. Academy bus lines.”
“She found one that was there?” Guess Slominsky forgot to read Ms. Boonshoft's memo. “You should look into that. Maybe some of those old farts on the bus heard or saw something.”
Ceepak nods. “This is excellent work. Ms. Boonshoft is to be commended for her thoroughness.”
“Yeah. I told her to ask around. She followed through pretty good.” Slominsky takes back the shopping bag. Rifles through it like it's a sack of dirty socks. Ceepak cringes. “What else we got in here? Oh yeah. Digital tape. From the indoor security camera. You guys got a digital player?”
“Roger that.”
“Good. This tape won't play in a standard VCR
or
a DVD.”
Why do I think Slobbinsky tried both?
“Oh yeah. Here we go. The dead guy's drug works. We found these in the stall next to his. The handicapped crapper. Anyways, on the floor we found a syringe, spoon, Bic lighter and a ‘Hot Stuff' heroin bag.”
“Hot Stuff?”
“Yeah, you know—the cartoon devil from the old comic books. Looks like a pointy-headed baby in diapers? Red skin? Curly tail?”
“I've seen the character before,” says Ceepak. “Just didn't realize he had a name.”
“‘Hot Stuff.' Funny little fuck. When I was a kid, they used to sell his comic books at the drug store on the same rack with Casper and Baby Huey.”
Now he holds up a small plastic bag with an even smaller paper envelope inside it. The red devil in diapers is ink-stamped on the front flap.
“You've seen this Hot Stuff smack before, am I right?”
“Yes,” says Ceepak.
I've seen the little devil before too.
It's our local brand.
Hot Stuff doesn't come from Iraq or Iran. It's processed and packaged by unknown criminals in Sea Haven. So where did Shareef Smith buy it?
I'm starting to wonder whether Osvaldo Vargas, the young janitor and newest Feenyville Pirate, has a side job as their drug rep down at the exit 52 rest area.
We dash
across the street, hop into our Ford Explorer, and head up Ocean Avenue to the station house.
We've got a digital tape player back at police headquarters and that's the piece of evidence Ceepak says we should examine first. I drive, Ceepak works his cell phone. Calls Grace back at the Pig's Commitment.
“Still no answer? You're trying both numbers? Thank you, Grace. Appreciate it.”
He snaps the clamshell shut.
“She thinks the Smith sisters might be at church,” he says. “We should swing by the rental house and advise Sergeant Dixon that we're making progress. We might convince him to extend our deadline past seventeen-hundred hours.”
That's 5:00 PM. Six hours to go before Dixon and his crew go ballistic and turn into vigilantes like Charles Bronson in that movie on late-night cable:
Death Wish
. Guess taking the law into your own hands was pretty popular back in the seventies. Bronson made like a dozen
Death Wishes
.
“You want to go talk to Dixon first?” I ask as we cruise down Ocean Avenue. Kipper is back in the other direction, north of King Putt Golf.
“Let's hit the house. Study the surveillance tape. See if we are telling the truth when we say we're making progress.”
“They were being economical,” says Ceepak.
Yeah. I guess they were saving digits. Or tape. Or runs out to Wal-Mart for fresh cassettes. Whoever set the frame rate on the surveillance camera went with the lowest one possible: one-third of a frame per second. About a hundred times choppier than real life. It's like watching the world jitter past on fast-forward. In the top right corner of the screen, there's a spinning time stamp. When we hit the hours we're most interested in, Ceepak asks me to switch to slow motion. I thumb the remote. Now the freeze-frames strobe and blink at us in a stuttering slide show. Snapshots of hungry motorists bopping down the line at Burger King. Popping up to the counter at Starbucks. Bending over in front of vending machines to fish out bags of M&M's. One second a whole group is seated at a table in the food court, the next they're up, and out, and gone. Guess that's what rest areas are all about. In and out. Out and in. All day. Every day.
“I wish we had the exterior tapes,” I say, already frustrated by the shoddy footage available from the single interior camera. “The parking lot view could really help us.”
“Superintendent Insana is working on it. Apparently, one of the exterior cameras was damaged this weekend and that has caused the delay. However, we should have whatever might be available soon. Maybe today. Perhaps tomorrow. There!”
He jabs his finger at the screen. I hit the pause button.
“Might I have the remote?”
I hand it to him. Ceepak rocks the video back a frame. The digital display reads 21:05:08. Ceepak taps the lower left corner of the screen.
“Do you see him, Danny?”
I lean in. Squint. I see a short, fuzzy blob near another even shorter fuzzy blob.
“Is that a janitor?”
“I believe so. Note the outline of a baseball cap here. And this, we can assume, would be his supplies cart.”
“Okay,” I say. “Twenty-one-oh-five. Nine-oh-five PM. That would be Osvaldo Vargas.”
Ceepak nods. “He signed the clipboard at nine-oh-five.”
So he lied. Cheated a little. Didn't actually hit the men's room until, let's say, 9:07.
We skip-frame through the next hour a little more slowly. It's amazing how many people visit the candy shop between 9:00 and 10:00 PM. Everybody's buying something to munch on down the road. This is why they sell snack food in containers that fit in cup holders. Makes it easier to eat and drive.
“There he is again.”
Ceepak freezes the frame time-stamped 22:03:47.
“He's a little earlier this hour.”
“Indeed,” says Ceepak. “We know he will go into the men's room at ten-oh-five.”
Ceepak nods. “Let's see if anybody else rolls a mop bucket through this zone prior to Mr. Delgado coming to work at eleven.”
Yeah. Because, if they do, it's our guy.
We move through the tape even slower. Minute by minute. Second by second.
“What's that?” I say.
“Mother with baby carriage,” says Ceepak.
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“Similar configuration. Easy mistake.”
We plod on.
Ceepak pauses the tape. Thinks he sees something. No. He was wrong. Shakes his head. “Burger King employee. Emptying trash barrels.”
He's right. The BK kid has a different-shaped baseball cap and is pushing a bigger blob.
22:10. Nothing.
22:15. Nothing.
This could be the dullest video ever released—worse than those straight-to-DVD movies they try to flog off at Blockbuster.
“Maybe the killer brought in his own mop bucket,” I say, hoping it might tear us away from this very poorly paced movie. This is worse than a black-and-white chick flick in French.
“It's a possibility,” says Ceepak. “Definitely a possibility.” He's not really listening to me. He's focused, his eyes in a laser lock on the grainy screen.
My eyes drift. I see that Denise Diego, the tech officer who usually works in this room, has a brand new
Lord of the Rings
figurine glued to the top of her computer monitor. Gandalf, I think. The guy with the long white beard. Of course, there were a lot of guys with long white beards in that particular trilogy. Could've called it
Lord of the Whiskers. Bilbo's Bearded Buddies
…
“There!” says Ceepak. “Twenty-two-thirty-five and twelve seconds.”
My eyes return to the fuzzy screen.
“Unfortunately, the image is quite compressed,” says Ceepak. “Limited number of pixels. I can attempt to blow it up … .”
The blobs zoom into an assortment of gray squares piled on top of each other like a stack of oddly shaped pizza boxes.
“It's him!” I say. “Osvaldo! The janitor. See? It's the same guy. The same height. There's the baseball cap. The mop handle. That's probably the bucket! You can kind of make out the wheels …” I'm tapping the screen in so many places I'm smudging it with fingerprints even Saul Slobbinsky could read. “Is it Vargas?” I ask.
“It's a possibility, Danny.”
“He's our guy! I knew it. He's probably running drugs for the Feenyville pirates and sold Smith the Hot Stuff heroin and then went back in to shoot him after he shot up and then, when he saw what a mess he made, he had to go get the mop!”
“Why?”
“Because, like I said, he made a mess.”
“Why did he kill Smith?”
“Hunh?”
“Means, opportunity, motive, Danny.”
Okay. So far all I've got is opportunity. I think. Maybe. Could just be that other category: coincidence.
“Why would Osvaldo Vargas want Shareef Smith, a visitor from Baltimore, dead?”
“Maybe Smith shorted him on the drug deal. Maybe Vargas and Smith were friends, like his sister said. Maybe Smith made fun of Vargas's mother. I don't know.”
“Neither do I. And, until we do, we keep digging.”
“Means, opportunity, motive,” I mumble. “Mom.”
“Hmm?”
“M.O.M. It's how I memorized it for the test at the academy.”
“Oh. Interesting. Clever mnemonic device.”
Yeah. Now I just have to find all three.
We secure the rest of the evidence. Pack it up properly. We use an official evidence storage carton and toss Slominsky's grocery sack. We also take a quick glance at the crime-scene photos when Ceepak inserts the disk into a computer to make a backup copy of the contents.
The CSI photographer does a much better job of capturing what I sort of caught with my cell phone camera: you can clearly see where somebody slopped a mop across the back wall to cut off the trail of blood trickling down toward the floor. It's three tiles up—right where the stall panel is anchored to its aluminum wall bracket. On the floor, I can see a swirled smudge, most likely the result of a dirty mop head.
Ceepak hits eject.
“Let's go visit Sergeant Dixon. Make our report.”
And bargain for a few extra hours to find M.O.M.
“You gentlemen
care for a sticky bun?”
Sergeant Dixon looks extremely hung-over. He's sitting on the patio, at the picnic table, smoking a cigar stump and chomping on one of the gigantic wads of fried flour and brown sugar they sell at Crust Station Crumbs, a bakery on Ocean Avenue where they specialize in chocolate chip cookies the size of manhole covers.
“Mickey Mex picked these up fresh, first thing this morning.”
Miguel Hernandez is the only other soldier currently at the rental house. He shuffles across the patio with a white bakery bag, its bottom stippled with grease stains. He plops it on the picnic table near Dixon's mug of coffee.
“Dig in,” says Dixon. It sounds like an order.
“No, thank you,” says Ceepak.
“They're good.” Dixon licks a brown wad off his thumb. “Weigh about two tons each. Mickey Mex can pop one in the microwave for you if you want it warmed up, right Mick?”
“We had a big breakfast.”
“Oh. Big breakfast. Nice restaurant?”
“Actually, I ate at home. Bran flakes and a banana.”
“I see. So that's what you've been doing instead of tracking down the rat bastard who killed one of my men?”
“Negative,” says Ceepak. “Since last we spoke, we've amassed a great deal of evidence and are making tremendous progress.”
“That so? Good. Excellent. Who's your primary target? These pirates your partner mentioned yesterday? Nichols and Shrimp?”
“Too early to say.”
“Really? Well, by my watch it's nearly twelve-hundred hours. As you might recall, Officer Ceepak, I agreed to have my troops stand down until seventeen-hundred. You ask me, it isn't early, it's almost late.”
Ceepak changes the subject: “Where are your men?”
“Well, let's see. Mickey Mex is going inside to pour me another cup of Java.”
Hernandez takes the hint. Heads into the house.
“Handy Andy Prescott and Butt Lips said they were going over to your boardwalk. Wanted to check out the rides so they can puke up all of last night's party food, start the day on an empty stomach.”
“And Lieutenant Worthington?”
“Worthless? Who knows—maybe he and his daddy went over to the boardwalk too. Sounds like a good place to show off that Purple fucking Heart.”
Ceepak recoils. “The Purple Heart is a very prestigious honor.”
Dixon laughs. “Maybe. Depends on how you earned it. You know how Worthless got his?”
“I was told he sustained a leg wound during combat operations.”
Dixon laughs again. “Yeah. He sustained some self-inflicted shrapnel in his left toe at a traffic checkpoint.”
Ceepak tenses. “Come again?”
“Worthington posted Shareef Smith on guard duty one night. Car stops. Trunk searches. This was up near Yusufiya. Not much traffic. No Hajis passing through wired to blow. Anyway, around three-hundred hours, I hear this single gunshot. Pop! I scramble out of my rack to find out what the hell is going on. I run over to the checkpoint and see
Worthless rolling around in the dirt, screaming his head off. Says a fucking sniper nailed him in his foot when he strolled out of his tent to check up on Smith.” Dixon shakes his head in disbelief. “I ask the lieutenant if he has the Haji's coordinates. ‘Where is this sonofabitch sniper?' I say.'I'll personally blast his ass all the way up to paradise and his seventy-two fucking virgins, sir.'”
Dixon chuckles. Needs a second before he can go on.
“Smith points left. Worthless points right. Then, when each one sees what the other guy is doing, they both change their minds and point the other way.” Dixon crosses his arms across his chest to point in both directions, looks like a demented version of the scarecrow in
The Wizard of Oz.
“Poor Worthless. He probably figured he had enough shrapnel in his shoe to win a first-class ticket home. His daddy, however, had other ideas. In case you haven't heard, his old man, Winslow W. Worthington, is going to be our next president. Hey, you know what? Worthless should've sent
those
shoes home to Poppa. Let him walk around Washington in a boot with a hole in the toe!”
Ceepak looks grim. He doesn't like hearing this kind of story. Somebody cheated, then lied to steal something other brave men have given tremendous sacrifices to earn.
“You're telling us that Lieutenant Worthington's war wound was self-inflicted?”
“Nah,” says Dixon. “Haven't you heard? Lieutenant Worthington is a war hero. Just ask Shareef Smith. He was out there that night, saw it all. Saw the muzzle flash from over there—no wait, over there.” He flails his arms in both directions. Drops them. “Oh. I forgot.” He isn't laughing anymore. “You can't ask Shareef Smith anything, can you? Not unless you gentlemen know how to interrogate the dead.”

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