The Hundredth Man (14 page)

I stiffened. “You mean the thing with Ava? I’m concerned about her, sure, but it’s not “

“Not that. You’re not doing anything on your own, are you? On the headless cases?”

I jumped up. “What the hell would I do on my own, Harry?”

His eyes searched my face. “Like independent research. I know you get wild hairs sometimes.”

“Do you think I’d hold something back, Harry, is that it?” My voice came out clenched. I heard guilt beneath the anger.

His voice was calm, reasoning. “I didn’t say that, I was just wondering if you were doing any blue-sky. During the Adrian days it was like you were calling some psychic hotline, y’know. The shrinks and profile types saying the fire over the victim’s eyes was a form of hiding, that Adrian knew the vies. Then suddenly like out of air you get the idea it was a bonding mechanism.”

“It was a chance idea that panned out, nothing but serendip “

Harry cut me off with a lifted finger. “Next, you decide all the victims were chosen by proximity to another fire in their recent pasts. It turns out true. You suggest shadowing the fire department, checking scenes of potential arson, trying to find a guy scoping out his next vie. We do and bingo! you see that guy with the hair-pulling deal, what was that called?”

I looked away, hating how the Adrian case and its flotsam kept floating into today, bumping my ass.

“Carson, what was that hair stuff? Yanking it out?”

“Trichollomania, dammit.”

“Yeah. You saw that guy at the fire pulling out his hair like he’s shredding a rotten sweater. And there he is, Joel Adrian.”

I fought the compulsion to walk away. “I was there, Harry. I remember it.”

“Maybe there’s other stuff you don’t remember. Or don’t want to.”

My attempt at laughter broke before leaving my lips. It came out as a croak. “You think I’m getting senile? That it?”

“What I remember most is after the case. You laying in the hospital with that breakdown and “

I rushed toward him, hands jabbing the time-out signal. “Hold it, whoa … stop. No it wasn’t, dammit.”

Harry looked up with innocent puzzlement. “Wasn’t what?”

“A breakdown, dammit. It was stress and lack of sleep. Nothing else, nothing mental.”

“Did I say mental breakdown? I don’t think I did. I meant physical breakdown, exhaustion. Like you said, stress, hurrying and worrying, lack of winks. I do recall the word depression”

“Lack of sleep combined with stress can mimic chronic depression.”

“All I know is you could barely walk or talk for about a month.”

I stood and looked at my watch without noting the time. “Maybe we can make something out of this day. Do some work.” My voice came out angrier than I’d expected.

Harry put his hands on his knees and pushed slowly erect, like hoisting a bag of concrete on his shoulders. “All I’m saying, Cars, is you did a helluva job on the Adrian case, but it did a helluva job on you too. Just keep me in your loop, let me know what you’re thinking. It’s always good to bounce stuff off your partner, right?” He pointed to his head. “Gets lonely in here sometimes, Cars. People make fast decisions, don’t let anyone in on them.”

“Whatever you want, Harry.” I said it over my shoulder, a dozen feet gone and moving away, wondering what in hell that had been all about.

A 3:00 a.m. shooting at a notorious after-hours hangout left two dead and five injured. While the shooting wasn’t in itself notable, the twenty-year-old daughter of an activist minister was one of the injured, preliminary findings revealing she may have received her thigh wound in practice of the world’s oldest profession. The media was in full-court press, the detectives’ room chaos, cops running in and out, people yelling, phones ringing as snitches peddled useless lies and the media tried the back doors.

We retreated to a closet-sized meeting room and spread files and photos across the tiny table. Neither of us visited Nelson’s apartment or had a decent chance to study the inventory of his personal belongings, so we buried ourselves in the notes of the assigned detectives. The inventory wasn’t large, but we sifted sand for the nuggets linking Nelson and personals ads, since they’d connected Deschamps to Talmadge.

“Here’s something,” Harry said, jabbing his page. “Page three, item twenty-seven: “One silver metal (aluminum?) file box in closet. Personal papers. Insurance forms. Check stubs and financial records. Correspondence. Newspaper clippings.” Newspaper clippings? I wonder what paper? Be interesting if it was the News Beat.”

“I’ll get the car,” I said.

Nelson had lived in an apartment complex not far from Brookley Airport. The long common hall smelled of grease-cooked food. The rug had patches of mildew, or maybe mange. Someone at the far end of the hall had “Whip It” on the stereo. Harry and I followed the manager, Briscoe Shelton, to a brown door with the number 8-B scribed on it with Magic Marker. Shelton was a skinny, rusted-out redneck in his mid-fifties who smelled of cigarettes and WD-40.

He wore stained painter’s pants and a sleeveless T-shirt that had once been white. A heavy chain jangled from his belt to his back pocket. When he flipped the chain a rattling clot of keys popped from his pants and landed in his hand. You could tell he’d spent hours practicing the move. Harry verified the scene tape was intact, then sliced through with a penknife.

“I never liked the little sonofabitch, y’know,” Shelton testified as he poked at the lock with key after key. “Never paid his rent on time, but always managed to get it in just before I could legally evict the smartass.”

“Did he have any regular guests, Mr. Shelton?” I asked.

“He had a damn parade through here. Men, women, boys, girls, and some whatchamacallits I couldn’t say what they were, y’know?”

“Anyone stand out?”

“There was the chunky girl with the vanilla-pudding face and Minnie Mouse voice. Spent a lot of time here a couple months back. Real lovey dovey at first, then later a lot of yelling and shit.”

Given the time frame and the description, I figured that was Terri Losidor. Shelton held the clot of keys in front of his face and squinted at it, separating a key from the rest. “And there was one guy I remember cuz he was so different from the riffraff and perverts. Older guy, compared to the rest of the circus. Always came at night. He’d pull up at the far end of the building and hustle in like he had fire in his britches. After a while they’d come out and take off and sometimes I wouldn’t see smartass for a few days, y’know.”

“When was this?” Tasked.

A key fit and the door swung open. Hot, stale air poured out like trapped memories. Harry’s run to the AC probably made the folks downstairs think the roof was caving in.

“Maybe two months back. Sniffed around regular for a month or so, then I didn’t see him no more. Didn’t mean he weren’t here, just means I didn’t see him. I don’t spy on my people. Even perverts.”

Shelton stayed by the door as Harry and I scoped the place out. “You get done be sure and pull the door. How long’s it gonna be ‘fore I can rent the fucking place?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Shelton. Perhaps a week until we release it,” I said.

Shelton screwed up his pasty face. “That means a month ‘fore I can rent, y’know.”

“Why’s that, sir?” Harry asked.

Shelton showed us yellow teeth. “Cuz it’s gonna take least three weeks to air the stink of faggot outta here.”

“Fun guy,” Harry said, as Shelton’s boot steps disappeared down the hall. “Wonder does he do parties?”

While Harry checked for the file box, I promenaded through Jerrold Elton Nelson’s life. If I’d been handed a dictionary and allowed one word for the surroundings, I’d have circled meagre, choosing the Brit spelling to add a Dickensian twist to the sparseness. The furniture looked like rental-company repos: just enough use left to make it salable.

The TV was a nineteen-inch make I’d never heard of. The flatware pocketed from cheap restaurants. The bed a king-size box spring and mattress on the floor. A squat chest was beside the bed and in it I found a twenty, two tens, and a fistful of coins, mostly pennies. A weight bench centered the living room, weights, barbells, and dumb-bells scattered around it. When closed the mirrored closet doors reflected the bed.

The only place abundance ruled was the bathroom. Nelson had more primping supplies than a poodle parlor: shampoos, conditioners, rinses, holding sprays. There were mouthwashes, skin washes, hand washes, creams, lotions, jellies. I counted seven hair brushes and three blow dryers. He owned four different kinds of tweezers. What and where did he tweeze?

While I counted colognes I was at eleven Harry came in with the aluminum box and held it up for my inspection. Larger than a lunch box, smaller than a briefcase. Handled. A hinged opening at the top.

I said, “And?”

Harry flipped the box upside down and the top dropped open. Nothing fell out.

“Empty but for echoes. No forms, bank statements, or newspaper clippings.”

“They’ve got to be there,” I said. “They’re on the list.”

Harry tossed the box on the bed. “Yeah, that’s what I used to say at Christmas, Cars. Somebody got here before us and whatever’s in that box is as gone as my high round ass.”

I stood in the middle of the shabby apartment and stroked my chin exactly the way perplexed detectives do on TV. “My, my, what do you make of that?” I puzzled.

Squill had instituted daily 4:30 p.m. meetings since our get-together with the brass. It was him, Burlew, Lieutenant Guidry of the Crimes Against Persons Unit, Tom Mason, and any other precinct detective who felt they could make a contribution. Today, this was Jim Archibold and Perk Delkus from D-2. Usually this meeting was to report leads from snitches on the street, which, like most snitch-generated leads, were constructed from hope and horse shit. Hundreds of man-hours went into chasing snitch-generated phantoms. Squill reported our meetings to the brass, giving him a stranglehold over information. I’d seen the chief exactly once since our ecumenical assembly, on television, where he was calm and reassuring and used Squill’s vocabulary.

Squill entered and assumed head position at the table, the omnipresent Burlew beside him, chomping his pulp.

“Let’s make it quick, folks, got a crisis brewing with Reverend Dayton’s five-bucks-fucky-sucky daughter. Anything new on the Nelson-Deschamps cases?” Squill’s eyes glittered and I figured it was because the preachers’-kid incident had him working the media, his only true talent.

The meeting commenced with other teams speaking first and often redundantly. We’d already shared info this morning without a big table, without Squill as a moderator, and without a combined ten man-hours lost. Tobias and Archer had discovered Deschamps was involved in a civil suit, trying to recover money owed for a design job. Nelson had been arrested for soliciting in Pensacola two years back. The incidents needed proforma checking, but neither seemed to have a bearing on the cases. Squill would nonetheless tell the media two promising new leads were being investigated.

When the others finished, I added our info.

“We’ve got an odd incident, Captain. When Nelson’s apartment was tossed, the report mentioned a box containing bank statements, correspondence, newspaper clippings, and the like. Harry and I checked the box its contents were gone.”

Squill waved an imperious hand and revisited an apologia designed for budget-request meetings. “A mistaken entry in the catalog,” he dismissed. “Happens all the time, much as we’d like to believe the contrary. Too many cases, too few personnel, tired eyes doing the cataloging … “

“Bill Harold and Jamal Taylor did the cataloging. Taylor definitely recalls going through the box and itemizing.”

“It was a thief, then, Ryder. We can’t put a twenty-four-hour guard on everything.”

“The tape was intact. Plus this thief ignored a TV and about fifty bucks in order to steal a handful of paper.”

Squill shook his head as if amused. “Are you going somewhere with this?”

“It’s in the report. Deschamps and Talmadge met through the personals in the News Beat I wanted to see if any of the newspaper clippings mentioned were from the News Beat or the personals section of the Register. Maybe Nelson was contacted the same way. It’s a long shot, but I want to rule out personals ads as the victim-selection process.”

Burlew emitted some form of noise, a burp or a grunt. Squill looked at him before aiming his eyes back at me. “It’s not your goddamned job, Ryder. You and Nautilus are supposed to be the Psychopathological Crime team. If I remember from the forming of this cobbled-together unit, that’s the angle you’re supposed to be working. The psychological aspect? Like what does the writing on the bodies mean?”

“I have no idea.”

“No idea? Great. How about, do you know if the writing’s important?”

“To the killer, yes. But it may be so intensely personal that “

Squill smirked. “You think it’s important. But here you are chasing your tail about some supposed newspaper scraps.”

“It’s all we have.”

Squill shook his head. “Damn right it is. For all your squatting and grunting you’re producing nothing. Nada. Zip. Who is this guy? What’s he think like? What do the words on the bodies mean?”

“You don’t just rub your hands over the words and they come to you.”

His smirk turned to shark teeth. “Don’t you smart-mouth me, mister.”

“I was explaining why papers removed from the home of a dead man might have significance.”

Squill sat back, suddenly disinterested, and made his pronouncement. “Let the district detectives handle the day-to-day work, Ryder. If Piss-it does nothing but walk the tracks of the other teams” he flung his hands up “what the hell good is it?”

Harry said, “It was walking the tracks of the other teams that gave us the missing papers in the first place.”

Squill ignored Harry and stood. “Anyone have anything else to say?” His tone said he wouldn’t be happy if they did.

“Dismissed,” he said. “Next time let’s try for some hard leads.”

As he strode out the door he spat the words Piss-it just loud enough for everyone to hear.

Harry and I sat at the table and studied our hands as everyone filed out. Tom thumped us each on the shoulder as he passed. “Y’all really eating the shit sandwich on this one, guys,” he said, dolefully. “I’ll be damn glad to get you back.”