The Hundredth Man (25 page)

Harry did devil’s advocate. “What if we’re wrong, she’s got nothing? Clean?”

“She smells like a kennel, Harry. You’ve said that a dozen times.”

Unless Terri had a friend who sucked wood pulp, Burlew and Losidor were tied together. The lines still disappeared around a blind corner, but ragged ends were showing. It was time to grab the nearest one, yank hard, and listen for what tumbled.

Harry said, “When we admit to working Nelson, Squill’s gonna blow a valve. Claim DDO maybe.”

Disobedience of a Direct Order meant a month without pay and generally preceded a down tumble in the department. It would spell the end of PSIT.

“I can wear this hat myself, Harry. It was me tossed Nelson’s place and called Friedman.”

Harry shook his head. “Huh-uh, bro. We are the right brothers, and this plane’s a two-seater. Time to put the vise to Burlew. Trouble is, we don’t know where the juice’s gonna squirt from. He’ll pop it and slop it.”

“Keep that umbrella handy.”

Harry went silent, found my eyes. “You know, don’t you, we’ll maybe squeeze Doc P as well. You ready for that?”

The morgue schedule had confirmed my worst fears: Clair took four days of vacation in March, three overlapping the days Nelson spent in Biloxi.

I nodded. “I’m ready.”

“No, you’re not,” Harry said. “But you’re as close as you’re gonna get.”

Squill’d shifted our daily meetings to 5:30. The grumblers said he did it to keep us from supper a bit longer. They were probably right. The usual crowd attended, including Burlew. He leaned against a wall, squeezing his hands together, either isometrics or he was congratulating himself. Harry shuffled pages, looked at Squill, and started.

“We’re pursuing a line of inquiry related to Nelson. We think this woman, Terri Losidor, knows more than she’s saying.”

I said, “We want to bring her in for questioning. She’s cool in her living room, but let’s make her feel like we’re crawling down her windpipe.”

Burlew stopped his squeezing. Squill half rose from his seat, his face a sudden scarlet. “Nelson? I told you to concentrate on Deschamps. No, I ordered you “

I said, “The two vies aren’t hermetically sealed, Captain. Paths crossed in front of us and we tripped onto Nelson’s again.”

His voice was clenched, barely audible. “This came from that box crap, didn’t it. Lost papers or whatever?”

“No,” I said, revising the borders of truth. “This was new information presented in the course of the investigation.”

Squill’s eyes seared into mine. A vein pulsed blue in his pale forehead. Here it comes, I thought. Tossed off the case …

A chair squeaked like a wounded fiddle and all eyes turned to Wally Daller. He stopped swiveling his chair, laced his fingers behind his head. His rumpled jacket fell open, tie askew across his large belly. “Ah, hell, Captain. What’s it matter as long as we’re moving ahead. That’s the point, ain’t it? Solve the goddamn thing?”

Squill started to speak, but nothing came out. There was a long pause and heads started nodding. Grunts of assent. Rose Blankenship jumped in, probably as tired of watching us get beat up as we were of taking the shots. “If you think this Terri’s got a lead, I say haul her ass in here.”

Blasingame rapped the table with his knuckles. “Hell, yes. I’m sick of bumping my head on the wall.”

Hembree from Forensics said, “The scenes have been cleaner’n a nun’s whistle. You got somebody to squeeze, I say take the shot.”

“I’d love to have a search warrant for her place,” I said. Though there was nothing to justify it, I wanted to see Burlew’s reaction.

He stood as still as a man carved from stone, not even breathing.

“Can’t do that,” Tom Mason said. “Unless you got something you’re not telling about, Carson.”

“Working on it,” I said, implying we maybe had more without saying it, since we didn’t.

Rose said, “If we bring her in and she squeals for a lawyer, that’ll tell us something in itself.”

Heads nodded. The dynamic in the room slipped from Squill’s grasp and moved toward police work. I could have kissed Wally on his big pink brow. He looked at me and winked.

Wally, you sly dawg …

I kept the momentum going. “I don’t think she’s directly involved, I think it’s something peripheral, something to do with Nelson’s last days. She’s tough in her living room, but” I gestured widely with my hands, meaning the whole place, sound and smell and flinty-eyed men and women walking around with large guns hanging off them “we all know what a little ambience can do.”

Harry grabbed the reins. “Terri’s never had any brush with the law, probably never been in a place like this before. She’ll come in tough, be singing two minutes later.”

I stole a look at Burlew. His face was impassive. But I saw fear in those tiny eyes, and sweat crescents beneath his arms.

Squill looked confused, like he was missing something important and didn’t know whether to bull forward or step back.

Sergeant Bertram Funk stuck his head into the room. “This the meeting on the headless murders?”

It gave Squill a chance to be officious. “We’re very busy here, Sergeant. What is it?”

Funk handed Squill a message. His lips moved as he read it. He stood. “It seems a severed head was found just off McDuffie Island. It’s on its way to the morgue and Dr. Peltier is standing by. This may have a bearing on the case, let’s see what the ME has to say. I want the regulars on the case at the morgue in one-half hour.”

Terri Losidor fell off the agenda for now. Burlew mumbled about an appointment and was gone before most of us were standing.

It took less than fifteen minutes for Burlew to pound on Terri Losidor’s door, run inside, and return moments later with an expandable file folder tucked under his arm. Terri slammed the door behind him. Burlew squirmed into his unmarked, jammed the folder under the seat, and left the blue smoke of burnt rubber in his wake.

“I got the feeling we’re about to get this hog pitted,” Harry said as we pulled out from behind a Dumpster in Terri’s parking lot, giving Burlew a block-long head start. “We’re gonna kill it and grill it.”

“Snark it and bark it,” I said, rising to the challenge. Harry looked at me like I’d come from the John with a saucer-sized wet spot on the front of my pants. “Hopeless,” he said, rolling his eyes.

Burlew drove straight to the morgue. He hadn’t done anything with the folder; still beneath his seat. Squill showed up a few minutes later and the pair went inside. Burlew walked lightly as he entered the morgue, like a burden was rising from his shoulders.

Harry dropped me out front and I headed through the door. Once inside, I turned and saw him pull beside Burlew’s car. Harry slipped out, a slim-jim tucked against his side.

The head on the autopsy table was in sad shape, dark flesh hanging like half-cured rubber cement. Clair gently plucked at it with shiny tools. Squill stood against the wall and held three overlapped masks to his nose. I figured this was the second or third time in his life he’d been in the morgue.

“Where the hell’s Nautilus?” Squill said, the masks muffling none of his irritation.

“He stopped in the can, Captain.”

Squill looked disgusted, but I couldn’t tell if it was from Harry’s tardiness or the stench of the putrifying head. Burlew was impassive, his jaws punishing a fresh scrap of paper.

“Definitely Peter Deschamps’s head,” Clair said, holding up an X-ray sheet. “Dental records clinch it.”

“Is there damage to the head, Doctor?” I asked.

She frowned. “It’s been here less than an hour, Ryder. I can say I’ve found a puncture in the parietal lobe, the size of a clean entry of a .22 or .25 bullet. No exit wound unless it exited an ear or nostril, which does happen, but is rare enough I’ll bet the slug’s inside.”

“Does it shake like a maraca?” Harry asked, coming through the door. The smell hit him and he went for his handkerchief. Harry winked at me through watering eyes. He’d copped the folder.

“No, Detective Nautilus, it does not.”

I said, “Other damage or abuse? I mean, given the time you’ve had to inspect it, Doctor Peltier? Signs of a beating, for instance.”

“I again stress we’re just getting started. But right now it appears the head was simply removed and discarded.”

“He won’t be happy when he finds the folder gone,” I ventured, in the front seat now, too adrenaline-charged to recline.

When nothing monumental had been revealed at the morgue, Squill dismissed the troops. Harry and I resumed our lag-back tracking of Burlew. We hung three quarters of a block back, keeping ample traffic between the vehicles. Harry said, “He’d jammed the stuff way under the seat. He won’t grab for it until he gets where he’s going. Home, judging by it.”

Burlew slowed, turned down the street he lived on. Tidy, midsize two-stories built in the fifties were shadowed by tall, mature trees. The lawns were well watered, verdant. A white-haired woman walked a glossy retriever. It was pretty enough to be a movie set, a Disney street. Until Harry had checked Burlew’s address, I figured he lived in some grimy ranch house in a one of those cookie-cutter suburbs installed in the fifties. Or a cave.

Harry K-turned in a drive and we broke off before passing Burlew’s house. I said, “Pull off somewhere and let’s see what sort of fish we caught.”

We parked behind an elementary school two blocks away. I gloved my hands and dumped out a sheaf of papers and an eight-by-ten envelope. I picked through the papers and found a page torn from the personals section of the News Beat I read it aloud.

“Gorgeous Man Wants A Loving Friend SWM, twenty-two, bi, safe. Blue eyes, dark brown hair, very good looking and masculine, buff build, beautiful smile, can be mild or wild, traditional or experimental, loves to travel and is a great companion. Seeks older man, distinguished and generous … “

“Nelson’s ad,” Harry said. “Generous? That mean what I think, Cars? Put down some money ‘fore you reach for the honey?”

I nodded and kept reading through a few more descriptives and a request for a photo.

Harry said, “Anything else in there, like Cutter’s ad? Or something from Losidor?”

I found another ad, very similar to the other, but aimed at women; they were both compelling ads and I figured Nelson, with a little training, could have been an ad copywriter.

But that was all that seemed to pertain to the cases. Nothing else stood out, like they were simply a wad of various forms clipped together for convenient storage. I set the papers aside and opened the eight-by-ten envelope.

IP

“Pictures of Nelson, I’ll bet,” Harry said. “Smiling for the audience.”

A stack of photos and a wallet of negatives shook out of the envelope. I studied a photo. Another. Then riffled through them like playing cards.

“Shit,” I said, handing the photos to Harry. He glanced at several, then dropped them back in his lap.

“Bales of it and pails of it,” he agreed.

CHAPTER 25

“T
his is difficult,” Zane Peltier said. He sat on a red velvet sofa and stared at the Oriental carpet. Beside him was the folder. The photos were in a file on a crystal table in front of him, upside down. Harry sat on a piano bench, a black Steinway gleaming behind him. I leaned against an ornate high-backed chair, a Louis the something-or-other. I could never keep my Louies straight.

Clair sat in a wing-backed chair to the side of her husband. Zane aimed his wet eyes at her. She looked away.

Their home was on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, in Daphne, on a high bluff overlooking the bay. The House of Peltier was an amazement of columns, arches, high embellished ceilings. Chandeliers seemed the norm, light from the tall windows sparkling through countless facets of dangled crystal. The furnishings fit the space: grand piano, looming wardrobes, marble-topped buffets of rare and hurled woods. Impressionistic paintings stood ease led at eye height. The snow-white carpet flowed so perfectly, it seemed to have been poured rather than laid. Yet, despite the diversity of objects and effects, I noted no cosanguinity of furnishings, no sense of two human beings living here, and only the barest feeling of life at all. The only hint of breath came from battered running shoes beneath a chaise, women’s shoes.

It was late afternoon, time for moisture evaporated from the Gulf to be dragged inland and dumped. It’s pocket rain, sun splashing the east side of a field while the west side’s beaten flat by raindrops the size of marbles. Through the cathedral window I saw dark clouds lined up to the horizon, cumulonimbus hanging like gravid bellies. Tucked between clouds were thin veins of blue sky, invisible until almost directly above. Harry shifted on his piano bench. I cleared my throat and addressed Zane.

“You were in charge of paperwork,” I said.

Zane inspected his lustrous black shoes through wet eyes. “I’m the businessman, Clair’s the doctor.”

“You set everything up.”

“She occasionally evaluated equipment for manufacturers. I suggested she turn it into a bona fide business, taxes and all. Bayside Consulting.”

I looked at Clair. She was the great stone face and I couldn’t imagine what it was hiding. We’d come to speak to Zane, but Clair appeared and snatched the folder away. She studied three photos, more than enough to tell the story, and handed them to her husband without a word.

Ten very long minutes ago.

I said, “Seeing Nelson’s body in the morgue shook you so much because you recognized it.”

“His hands. His skin. His ” Zane sunk his face in his hands. His fingernails shone like mica. He wore a small gold wedding band and a larger silver pinkie ring. Clair shuddered and looked away.

I said, “When you needed a cover for your trip to Biloxi, you had Bayside pay. Clair never sees the paperwork.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “She signs a few forms at tax time.”

“You met Nelson through the News Beat?”

“I was looking through it one day. I saw an ad … ” He looked at Clair. “Just for someone to talk to, just talk.”

Clair’s hands began to flutter, the motion quickly staunched. Zane continued. “We met and that’s when it all started. It was I don’t know … “