Last Ditch (32 page)

Reluctantly,
Trujillo switched his
focus to the sound of the voice.

"Yeah?"

"Car's
about up." "Thanks."

He
poked me in
the chest with a finger.

"You
stay
right here. I'm not through with you yet"

With
that, he
went crunching off across the gravel and disappeared around the rusted
corner
of the warehouse.

Although
I was
making it a point not to show it, that same question was bothering the
hell out
of me. Either this guy was a serial killer of some sort or something
about both
Bermuda and me had immediately set him off.
Problem was, I couldn't imagine anything Bermuda
and me had in common . . . except of course Wild Bill Waterman.

I
was still
massaging this idea about ten minutes later when Rebecca and Trujillo
came back around the warehouse.
Whatever flush Trujillo
had in his face when he left me had disappeared. He was fish-belly
white,
walking stiffly along beside Duvall, mindlessly wiping the comers of
his mouth
with his thumb and index finger.

And
that wasn't
the bad news. Rebecca was the bad news. Here was a woman who spent her
days up
to her elbows in bloated cadavers, and much like Detective Trujillo,
she had the
look of someone who'd seen something they were unlikely to forget. My
stomach
shrunk in toward itself like a dying star.

Trujillo
walked right past me
without a word,
let himself into the unmarked Ford and began to talk into the radio
mike.
Rebecca hooked her arm in mine. "An old Buick," she said.

"Was
he .
. . ?" "Uh-huh."

I
took several
deep breaths before I spoke.

"Could
you
tell . . . you know . . . how . . ."

"Someone
crushed his skull," she said evenly. "Then whoever it was drove
pieces of his canes through his eyes and ears."

A
groan slipped
from my chest.

"Not
by
hand, either. With something like a hammer."

I
wanted to
speak but wasn't sure I was able.

"He
was
killed in a frenzy, Leo. The kind of frenzy I've only seen from angel
dust
cases. Just howling mad rage."

Over
her left
shoulder, an orange coroner's van backed out of sight behind the Triad
warehouse, its yellow light flashing, its backup safety device beeping
in
four-four time.

Trujillo
was still ashen as he came
trudging
over from his car.

"I
want
you at the Downtown Precinct at eight o'clock sharp tomorrow morning.
I'll have
a departmental artist on hand. We're gonna need a composite."

"Better
make it about nine-thirty," I said.

"Don't
screw with me, Waterman, or I'll send you down there in a cruiser right
now.
That way, you'll be there when I need you."

"I
need to
pick up my car at eight," I said. "Somebody impounded the damn
thing."

He
pointed a
stubby finger at me. "All right, nine-thirty."

He
started to
leave but changed his mind.

"Waterman.
For the record, I'm going to tell you one more time. You stay out of
this. I
don't want to see your face again. You understand what I'm telling you
here?"

I
said I did,
but he wasn't finished. "I don't know how, but I've got a feeling that
you
poking your nose in where it doesn't belong is responsible for poor Mr.
Schwartz here." He wiped his mouth again. "I ought to drag your butt
over there and make you look at what some sick son of a bitch did to
that poor
old guy. Maybe then you'd have sense enough to let professionals do
their
jobs."

"Professionals
like your partner Wessels?" I asked.

He
turned his
attention to Rebecca. "Do us both a favor, Miss Duvall. Get him out of
here."

We
stood and
watched as he tromped off around the corner of the building. "Let's go
home," she said.

It
took the
better part of three hours to create a reasonable likeness of the Man
With No
Ears, and even then, it was unsatisfactory. While each of the
individual
features was more or less correct, and we'd duplicated the general
shape of the
face and fall of the hair, something remained amiss. All in all, what
with the
racial difference, I figured the average person, shown this drawing,
should be
able to distinguish between the suspect and, say . . . Karl Malden.

"Can
I
have a copy?" I asked.

The
police
artist was a woman whose name tag read SGT. TASKER. She said to call
her Fran.
A redhead with so many freckles it nearly constituted a tan. She was a
pleasant
woman, who seemed to be at ease with pushing forty and straining at the
seams
of her blue uniform.

"Sure,"
she said. "Hang on, I'll make you one."

I
rested one of
my cheeks on the desk as she left the room. This morning's headline had
read
WATERMAN DRIVER

MURDERED.
POLICE PROBE LINK TO PRICE CASE. Same MAN

ON
THE MOON
typeface. Pat had left me four, progressively snottier messages since
seven-thirty this morning. If he was pacing around waiting for a
callback, he
was going to get a lot of exercise.
Cur
this!

Tasker
sauntered back into the room with one of our Identi-Kit pictures in
each hand.
"It just can't recreate the anima,'' she said.

"The
what?"

"The
anima. The soul of a person. The person that's always in there looking
back at
himself."

I
looked at our
final product. She was right. We'd selected the right pieces, but the
pieces
had failed to yield a person.

"You
know
what's funny about these Identi-Kit pictures?" "What?"

"They
work
great for some people and not at all for others." "How so?"

She
wobbled the
picture in her hand.

"It's
the
anima thing. Some people can look at one of these things and make the
jump to a
real living face. They see the perp in the street, they're all over
him. Other
people . . . you could make one of these that was dead bang on of their
mother,
and they wouldn't have a clue. They just can't make the jump from paper
to
flesh. Can't be trained to do it either. Department's gone nuts trying
to train
them. Doesn't work. Either they got it or they don't It's weird."

She
held the
other picture out. "Here, take this one too."

I
folded both
pictures twice and slipped them in my pocket.

"How
do
painters manage it?" I asked. "Manage what?"

"To
create
real people when they paint."

"Talent,"
she said. "They put the anima back in. They take it from inside
themselves
and put it into their work."

She
caught me
taking stock of her and said, "I went to Cornish. Way back when. I
wanted
to be a fashion illustrator." She put her hand on her hip and took a
couple of fancy steps across the room. She let go a hearty laugh and
slid
behind her desk.

"Pretty
glamorous, huh?"

I
reckoned how
it was indeed tres haute and then asked, "You'll tell Trujillo I did my
duty as a citizen?"

"I'll
E-mail him instantly," she assured me.

I
put my hand
on my hip and flounced from the room in a grossly exaggerated sashay. I
could
hear her laughter booming behind me as I stepped out into the hall.

Gaylord
LaFontaine answered the door himself. He was wearing rubber gloves.
Carrying a
toilet brush in his right hand.

"Oh—I
was—" he stammered.

"Brushing
your teeth?" I queried.

He
brandished
the brush. "Maybe yours if you're not careful."

I
held up my
hands in surrender. "I'll be good," I vowed.

"Come
on
in," he said.

I
waited while
he trotted down the hall to the bathroom and divested himself of his
armor and
lance. He came back drying his hands on a paper towel and reading my
mind.

"My
sister
takes the kids on Sundays. Takes 'em to lunch and then a movie. Gives
me a
little break in the action."

"Nice
to
see you're using your leisure time so wisely," I said.

He
scoffed.
"Leisure. What's that?" I followed him into the family room. The
floor was a minefield of brightly colored plastic toys. "Davey got

E-mail
privileges," he said as we picked our way across the floor. "Jason
and Megan have been sending him messages every night before they go to
bed.
They're real excited about it." He began picking up toys from the
floor.
"Kind of gives the kids a way to be connected to their dad, even while
he's away."

"E-mail's
great, isn't it?" I said.

"I'm
just
now getting into it"

He
stood in the
center of the room with his hands on his hips. He went into his
grammar-school
teacher voice. "Toys gotta stay in this room. That's the rule. It's
rough
in here, but at least a body can walk around the rest of the place
without
breakin' a leg."

We
spent the next
ten minutes picking up toys and lobbing them into the big cardboard box
in the
corner. We got most of the big stuff.

"So
how
you doing on your investigation?" he asked as we ambled over to the
couch
and sat down.

"I'd
like
to think I'm making some progress," I hedged. ' 'What I know for sure
is
that, somehow or other, it all stems from that container full of
bodies."

"I
wouldn't be surprised," he said. "Tragedies like that have a way of
takin' a divot outta people."

I
pulled one of
the Identi-Kit pictures from the pocket of my jacket, smoothed it on
the edge
of the coffee table and handed it to him..

"You
ever
seen this guy before?"

He
looked it
over carefully.

"Can't
say
as I have," he said.

"How
about
without the long hair?"

He
shook his
head. "Guy his age oughtn't have hair like that. Makes him look like a
horse's ass," he said.

"Since
I
was here last, have you thought of anything else? Something you didn't
remember
the other day."

He
bowed his
head. "Just the smell," he said. "The smell inside that metal
box." He looked up at me. "Ever since you come the last time, I been
cleaning like a madman, tryin' to get that smell to go away."

Not
exactly
what I had in mind. I got to my feet.

"Sorry,"
was all I could think to say.

"You
don't
forget something like that," he said. "Changes your whole life."
He looked up at me. "I was never quite as gung ho again. Knowin' . . .
you
know . . . that something like that could happen and then the whole
thing could
get swept under the rug 'cause it was political."

He
got to his
feet and, together, we started for the door. Halfway across the room
Gaylord
LaFontaine spied a red fire truck hiding in the magazine rack and sent
it
spiraling back toward the box.

The
way I
figure it, investigations come in four styles and two of them are easy
to spot.
When you're asking the right people the right questions, everything
goes like
clockwork and everybody's happy. Case closed. Another satisfied
customer.

The
opposite
extreme is equally as easy to spot. When you're asking the wrong people
the
wrong questions, nothing at all useful happens, and the case likewise
tends to
be over in a big hurry. Except that, in that scenario, nobody's happy.
It's the
other two possibilities that are hard.

It
takes years
of experience to differentiate between those situations where you're
asking the
right questions of the wrong people and those situations when you're
asking the
wrong questions of the right people. Today, I had the overwhelming
feeling that
I just wasn't asking the right questions. That's probably why I was
wracking my
brain, trying to think of something else to ask Gaylord LaFontaine as
we walked
to the front door. And then ... it was out of my mouth before I thought
about
it.

"The
port
guy," I said. "The one who told you it was political and that you
should keep your nose out of it."

 
"Yeah?"'

"You
remember his name?"

"Sure,"
he said. " 'Cause it was like that runt who used to run Cuba before
Castro. Batista was his
name. Ralph Batista."

I'd
known Ralph
Batista for as long as I could recall and, for some odd reason, I'd
never once
entertained the possibility that somebody like Ralph might have been
thrust
straight from grace to the gutter by a single catastrophic event. I'd
always
figured he'd eased into sleaze. You know, the standard hard luck story.
Laid
off. The wife starts banging her Akito instructor. Our hero screws up
one thing
after another, starts drowning his bridges. Of all people, I should
have known
better.