Lowball: A Wild Cards Novel (17 page)

“How do you know he’s a communist?” Franny asked, and then they both began shouting at him.

Gordon decided to interrupt with the one fact that might be relevant. “Tom Junior didn’t smoke,” he pointed out. The lungs had been pink and healthy.

“Damn right Tommy didn’t smoke!” Mr. Heffer said.

“He was a good boy!” Mrs. Heffer wailed.

Perhaps it was the mention of tobacco that spurred Harvey Kant’s action. He drew a large cigar out of his gabardine jacket, snapped open his lighter, and brought the flame to the cigar’s tip. He puffed noisily and with great satisfaction, blowing out clouds of smoke. Mrs. Heffer sneezed. “Hey!” said Mr. Heffer. He pointed at the No Smoking sign. “You can’t do that in here!”

“I’m the lieutenant,” Kant said. “I decide who smokes and who doesn’t.”

Within a few minutes Kant had succeeded in gassing the Heffers into silence, after which he gave them the information necessary to claim their son’s body from the New Jersey morgue.

Mr. Heffer managed to summon an echo of his earlier belligerence. “Jersey!” he said. “What’s my boy doing up there?”

“It’s the Jersey cops’ case,” Kant said. “That’s where he was found.”

Heffer sneered. “Why in hell are we talking to you, then?” he said.

After the Heffers left, Gordon stood with Kant and Franny in the squad room. Gordon’s head swam, though he couldn’t tell whether it was from the cigar smoke or the Heffers’ shouting.

Kant took a last draw on his cigar, then crushed the lit end against his scaly palm.

“Right,” he said, and turned to Franny. “Tommy Heffer was kidnapped here and dumped in Jersey, the
CO
gave you this case, so liaise with the Jersey cops. Now—” He handed Franny the victim’s file. “In spite of what the mom said about his being a good boy, the vic had some scrapes with the law—drunk and disorderly, fighting, vandalism. He was never formally charged with anything, so he doesn’t have a record per se—but you can start by talking to the other kids who were arrested along with him.”

“They’re not kids. One of them is this guy Eel,” Franny argued.

“I know you’re the the big celebrity cop, but I’m the lieutenant.” Kant grinned. “So talk to the kids.”

A muscle in Franny’s jaw moved. “Yes, sir,” he said.

“Good boy.” Another gesture with the cigar. “The vic studied Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu,” Kant said. “And El Monstro was Brazilian. So there’s a connection, maybe, at the Jiu-Jitsu school.”

Franny looked dubious. “El Monstro was working at least two jobs as well as going to college,” he said. “I doubt he had time to train in martial arts—especially as he didn’t need to. Anyone attacking him would just bounce off. And Eddie said some of the guys sounded Russian.”

“Check it anyway,” said Kant.

Kant ambled back to his desk. Franny looked at the file folder in his hand, and his lips tightened. “Fran?” Gordon asked.

Franny jerked out of whatever thoughts were distracting him. “Yeah?”

“When you see the Jersey cops, could you not mention I have a house out in Warren County?”

“I didn’t know you had a place out there. But sure, okay.” Franny frowned. “Why?”

“I go out there to relax and work on my own stuff. I don’t want to be the guy they call on weekends when their own medical examiner is drunk.”

Which was true enough, though the shed full of rocket propellant had a lot more to do with why he preferred to remain invisible to his neighbors.

Franny nodded slowly. “Sure. That makes sense.”

“Thanks. See you later.”

Gordon returned to his basement morgue and finished helping Gaida bag the shooting victim, after which Gaida went to lunch and Gordon signed off on the last of the paperwork while gnawing on a log of homemade pemmican. He heard a knock on the door and looked up to see Dina Quattore. “Come in,” he said.

Dina was in uniform, curly black hair sprouting from beneath her peaked cap. The radio at her hip hissed and squawked.

“Just wanted to let you know another stiff is on its way,” she said. “Elderly street joker, walked in front of a bus while drunk, stoned, or otherwise impaired.”

“Am I needed at the crime scene?”

“No. Plenty of witnesses to what happened.”

“Okay.” Gordon capped his pen and offered his plastic container of pemmican. “Care for some?”

Dina approached and peered at the dark brown pemmican logs. “What is it?”

“Pemmican.”

“And what’s that?”

“Ground venison,” Gordon said, “rendered suet…”

“Wait a minute!” Dina yelped. “You’re offering me a roadkill meat bar?”

“It also has dried fruit, nuts, and honey,” Gordon pointed out. “Very nutritious. Everything your Mohawk warrior needs on the trail—good for quick energy, and you can store it for years.”

“How many years has this—?” Dina began, then shook her head. “Never mind. I’ll stick with the turkey sandwich I got at Mussolini’s.”

“Bring it and we’ll have lunch, if you have the time.”

Dina considered this. “You may not have the time, with the stiff coming.”

Gordon shrugged. “The deceased won’t be in a hurry.”

“True that.” Dina went upstairs to her locker, then returned with the plastic-wrapped sandwich and a can of Diet Pepsi. She parked herself on a plastic chair near the X-ray machine, then began to unwrap her sandwich. She looked at him from under the brim of her cap.

“Is it true what they say about you?” she asked.

“Depends,” Gordon said. “What do they say?”

“That you build rockets?”

He hadn’t realized any of the police officers actually knew that. Gaida, he thought, must have talked. Still, there was no reason to lie. “Yes,” he said.

“How big?”

He preferred evasion. “Different sizes,” he said.

“Gaida says you’re going to shoot yourself to the moon,” Dina said.

“Well,” he said. “I’d need help.” He told her about the Koopman Prize, and how anyone with a decent design was eligible. Dina chewed her turkey sandwich thoughtfully, then took a sip of her Pepsi. “I’m trying to figure you out, Doc,” she said.

Gordon considered this. “I don’t know that I’m particularly mysterious.”

“You’re not hidden,” Dina said, “but I’m not sure how all the parts fit together.”

Gordon had never considered himself as a collection of randomly ordered parts and had no answer to this. He took a bite of his pemmican and chewed.

Dina took off her cap and hung it from the X-ray machine. “You know,” she said, “I think you’re some kind of goofy romantic.”

“Uhh—” Gordon began, uncertain. He had never categorized himself this way.

“Yeah!” Dina said, suddenly enthusiastic. “You cut up bodies as part of your crusade for justice! You want to plant the flag on another world!” She pointed at the pemmican. “And you recycle dead animals!”

Gordon blinked. “I usually autopsy them first.”

She frowned. “Okay,” she said. “That’s disturbing.”

“I learn stuff,” he said.

He was about to object to being called a romantic and say that he was interested in the way jokers were put together in the same way that he was interested in the way rockets were put together—but then it occurred to him that if Dina thought of him as a romantic, that might say good things about her intentions toward him.

“Anyway,” Dina said. “I’d like to see the rockets.”

“Okay.” Pressing his luck seemed a good idea. “This weekend?”

“I’ve got family stuff on Saturday,” she said. “How about Sunday?”

“Sure.”

“I can take the train out, and you can pick me up at the station. I’ll see the rockets, and then you’ll take me out to dinner.”

“Great.”

“At a restaurant,” she added.

“If you like.”

Gordon decided that being a romantic was working for him. Until the weekend, when he found that Steely Dan had gone missing.

“Another joker vanished,” Franny said. He looked around Steely Dan’s living room, his pen paused over his notebook without anything to write. “Another element in the series,” he said. “And this time, the crime happens in New Jersey. And you think that dog-training facility may have something to do with it?”

Gordon followed Franny as he prowled into Dan’s kitchen, where a half-eaten breakfast of eggs and sausage sat on the dinette next to a cold cup of coffee. If there’d been a knock on the door while Dan was eating, he’d have left his breakfast and walked to the door to open it … and then what? A clout on the head, a jab with a Taser? Dan was strong, but his skin only looked like blackened steel. He was as vulnerable to a weapon as any nat.

“That Russian at the facility was very interested in Steely Dan,” Gordon said. “Kept staring at him.”

“Jokers get stared at,” said Franny. “More in the sticks than anywhere, I imagine.” He frowned. “The Jersey cops looked into that place when Tommy Heffer turned up there. But it’s legit—they even sell their dogs to the Jersey state cops.”

“They could have a legitimate business on top of whatever it is they’re really up to,” Gordon said.

“Maybe,” Franny conceded. “But there’s no grounds for a warrant.”

“I suppose not,” Gordon said.

If only Dina had sensed something.

And the weekend started so well
, he thought. Normally Friday was one of his busy days, for the simple reason that a lot of people got killed on Thursday night. The reason the homicide rates jumped on Thursday was that Friday was usually payday, and by Thursday people were starting to run short of money.

The usual scenario ran something like this:

1. Mommy wants to use the remaining money to buy Little Timmy’s school lunch on Friday.

2. Daddy wants to use the money to buy beer.

Therefore:

3. Daddy beats Mommy to death, takes the money, and gets drunk.

Unfortunately Daddy is usually unable to reason out the next couple of steps, which are:

4. Daddy ends up in prison, and;

5. Little Timmy gets lost in the foster care system, which mightily increases the odds of Timmy becoming an angry sociopath who perpetuates the cycle of violence into the next generation.

The other high time for homicide was late Saturday night and early Sunday morning, where the motivation might also be money, but was usually sex and/or love.

However, on this particular week in May, the bliss of a beautiful spring seemed to have descended on New York, and all the Daddies had decided they didn’t need the beer after all and taken all the Little Timmys of the city to the park to play catch, and Gordon was finished with his work by one in the afternoon. So he gave himself and Gaida the rest of the day off and took the train to Warren County, where he spent the rest of the afternoon loading model rockets with his homemade
APCP
and firing them into the mellow May sky.

On Saturday Steely Dan was scheduled to come round in the afternoon to help plot a static test facility for the aerospike engine, but he hadn’t turned up. Gordon called his home and mobile with no result, then called the garage where he worked. His boss said he hadn’t come in for work on Friday, and that he’d called Dan’s cell phone without getting an answer.

Steely Dan lived in an old shiplap farmhouse that came with twenty acres of decaying apple orchard. Gordon drove there, found Dan’s truck and car in the garage, and pounded on the door without result. That’s when he called Franny Black, and Franny called the Jersey police, who still hadn’t turned up.

New Jersey loved its jokers, that was clear.

Franny had found Dan’s spare key under a rock in the garden, and he’d let the two of them inside. “No sign of violence,” Franny said, prowling into Dan’s bedroom. “Nothing obviously stolen. No sign of abduction at all.”

Frustration flared in Gordon’s nerves. “I can tell you one thing,” he said. “Dan didn’t do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.”

“Christ.” Franny rolled his eyes. “That lead went nowhere,” he said. “Just like I told him it would.”

“Any leads on El Monstro?”

Franny shook his head, and tapped the butt end of his pen against his jaw. “Jokers,” Franny said. “Dogs. Jokers and dogs. Dogs and jokers.” He waved a hand in frustration. “I don’t get it.”

“What I get about the Jersey cops,” Gordon said, “is that they care more about the dogs than the jokers.”

Franny hesitated, then put a hand on Gordon’s arm. “I’ll find your friend.”

“Let’s hope,” Gordon said, “that he’s not found stretched out on a road somewhere.”