The dying detective, p.8
The Dying Detective, page 8
He presented a homeless figure: still in socks and sandals, loose white pants like a beach bum’s, and a green-and-yellow windbreaker over his short-sleeved white shirt. Kevin was still tall, if slightly curved along the compressing upper spine, with his small white head answering the moon that hung above the Gothic Parliament’s Peace Tower. He’d grown increasingly frustrated—How was it he used to proceed! Where had his famous factioning brain gone to? And already he was smoking continuously.
A couple of RCMP guards approached him. Before they got close he angrily told them to fuck off, and they startled and made to lunge just as they recognized him.
“Sorry, Detective Beldon.” Their eyes had widened and they were breathing heavily.
“I’m sorry, boys. I can’t explain; it’s the graveyard shift.”
“No call to explain, sir. Let us know if you need anything.”
As they headed back to the stationed squad car, with heads leaning together they chattered like a couple of girls/groupies who’d been allowed backstage.
Kevin had returned to where Mender husband and wife had sat. He jabbed about with the small cigar, establishing the four principals in their places—Johnson and Lucy sitting in the front row here, Mandrake Bledsoe addressing the crowd from atop the first flight of steps there, Michael Mender standing in the foreground as displayed guard—mentally drawing numerous lines connecting them till it diagrammed in his head like a wonky cat’s cradle. He had to concede: he wouldn’t mind having MYCROFT with him.
Given the most obvious connections—the imprisonment in the Caucs’ Smart Camp, the expansion plans into Canada of the Mandrake’s Hall Optimum Population franchise—the makings of motive and conspiracy were certainly there in embryo, as MYCROFT had speculated. But conspiring to what ultimate purpose? MYCROFT may have reimagined as much, but no computer could ever feel the sad truth of this story: a wounded family, abundant love and lasting hate, the self-destruction of revenge, messy human madness. MYCROFT might talk of situational insanity, of the new pan-explanatory Family Psychosis Syndrome, and of Psyche Economizing, but MYCROFT could never plumb the makings of madness in families or appreciate the twisted course of rational evil in the world.
Could he still? Could Detective Kevin Beldon trace it yet, all the way back through Cain and Abel to Adam and Eve—and beyond them to Satan himself?
Standing there on Parliament Hill, Kevin had felt something big and bad snuffling coldly at the back of his knees. Remember. …But he could remember only his reasons for retiring again, thought exclusively of warmer climes, of peaceful nights and meditation. He’d put both thumbs to his cheekbones and placed all eight fingertips on his brow—Mammy’s stressed pose—commenced drumming hard with his fingers. Think. Remember. Go over it again, and again and again.
Dr. Lieutenant-Colonel Mandrake Bledsoe had been replicating Mandrake’s Hall Optimum Population clinics all over the world, and for years illegally in Canadian jurisdiction. Judge Johnson Mender was opposed to that expansion. But that alone was weak motive for murder…unless exacerbated by…situational insanity? Mender was not mad. Michael Mender may have been made mad by the events he witnessed that morning—his first security charge murdered by his own father!—but Johnson Mender was one of the sanest men Kevin had ever met. He’d known Johnson personally since the Omphalos-Widower—Don’t think of that. That connection has nothing to do with these connections. Your paranoid delusions will not help you here!
But despite all Jaken’s teaching and his own meditative exercises, Kevin could never restrain his hunches or his gut-feelings, discipline his thinking, push back against his nudging factioning. If there was something to be thought, Detective Kevin Beldon had to think it. That was his glory and his torment, and the simple secret of his compulsive method: to remember everything, over and over and over again, successes and especially failures. The word factioning had mainly been the flashy Macro’s adoption of the neologism coined to contain his mysterious method of patiently living inside a world of suspended facts, and (what no one knew) of his becoming criminally minded for the sake of the law.
Patience then.
The facts:
One: the incorruptible Judge Johnson Mender had been corrupted in Kevin’s last case, the Omphalos-Widower serial killings, which had turned out to be the work of Dr. Ewan Randome. For no legally justifiable reason, at a crucial point in Detective Beldon’s investigation, Judge Mender had refused a search warrant on Omphalos, the world’s dominant philanthropic NGO and Dr. Ewan Randome’s home and cash cow—the judge had actually issued a restraining order on Kevin. Conclusion: Dr. Randome must have had something big on Johnson Mender to compromise such a judge’s integrity. In the end, though, Kevin had solved the Widower case, if only to force Randome to flee Ottawa, Canada, and North America.
Two: in the Parliament Hill triple killings, Randome could have used Johnson Mender again, this time to eliminate Mandrake Bledsoe, counting on Mender then being eliminated by Bledsoe’s security (even arranging for that). Lucy Morningstar-Mender was murdered to silence some counter-narrative. How Michael Mender’s disappearance figured in this must remain a mystery, for the present.
Conclusion: Randome had orchestrated Bledsoe’s and the Menders’ murders on Parliament Hill—to lure Detective Beldon onto a case that would prove to be his, Randome’s, ultimate revenge against Kevin, and his daughter Kelly, and Chief Brigid Ertelle.
There and then two years ago on Canada’s Parliament Hill at three in the morning, returned from his second retirement in California, Detective Kevin Beldon had come to a realization and decision:
This whole thing is a stinking pile of old Randome shit. Why disturb it? Let it stay crusted over. Be sensible for once instead of bloodhound mad. Turn your snout away. Or you’ll hear Randome howl his own mad laughter all the way from Port-au-Prince when you step deeply into his smelly mess.
Later that morning he’d told Chief Ertelle that it looked just as MYCROFT speculated: Judge Johnson Mender and Dr. Lieutenant-Colonel Mandrake Bledsoe had some old vendetta going back to the Caucs’ Smart Camp. One of Bledsoe’s quick-thinking security had filched Monty Parizeau’s sidearm and dutifully killed Lucy Morningstar-Mender, perhaps out of senseless ambition. Michael Mender, seeing his life collapse around him, had been instantly shocked into situational insanity; he’d run; by now a likely suicide. Family Psychosis Syndrome, just as MYCROFT said.
Brigid had looked at him with basset eyes, and he back at her like a dog refusing a winter’s-day walk.
“I see. That’s it then?”
He didn’t blink: “That’s it.”
“No factioning?”
“No factioning.”
“Before you return to your Jaken, will you find out for certain what’s happened to Michael Mender, for me, Kevin, please? I don’t accept that Michael would kill himself. If you’d known him better, you’d know that too. I’d go after him myself only, well, my Mike and I are trying for another kid and there’s an optimum spot for conception in a woman’s cycle.”
“How romantic you make it sound.”
She smirked. Then said seriously: “Will you do it quietly, Kevin? Michael is probably sick, and vulnerable. I’ll take the rap if there’s trouble. I should have been there that day.”
“You couldn’t be there that day.”
“When you’ve apprehended, will you come back and visit with us? We’ve forgotten other things; we can forget this mess over a bottle of Chianti.”
Kevin smiled: “That’s Jaken’s preferred poison too.”
“Jaken.”
A few inquiries to old biker-gang acquaintances (the Lobos’ Snake) and Kevin had soon discovered that Michael Mender was indeed on the run. He could easily have apprehended, but for his own selfish reasons he’d tailed him only. He’d even put Global Patrol off the trail where Michael had torn up a fleabag hotel room in Syracuse.
He wants to be caught, of course, Kevin had thought, standing at the open hotel room window above a struggling pigeon whose shimmering green neck was punctured through on a sill spike. It was still alive, if struggling towards quietude and imminent death. The beak like delicately carved ivory stained by a pointillist, the dove-grey wings with washed-blue feathers: such beauty, such brutality. He’d lifted it off the spike like a tin arrow designed to allow no undesecrated escape; he’d held it for a moment in the crook of his neck, then wrung its neck and flung it onto the tar-pebbled roof below. He’d swooned and felt himself crash with it, then like his open eyes were jammed against roughest sandpaper.
Where am I?
Don’t lose it, love.
Cynthia’s voice inside him.
So he had followed Michael to New York. Kevin was sure someone contacted Michael in Central Park, but he had missed the actual meeting. He continued tailing as far as the receding tip of Florida, no longer having to cover the boy’s tracks, because someone else was doing it better. Someone. Kevin prayed the trail didn’t lead to Haiti. Jaken had done that for him, taught him to pray again, though Kevin preferred the words of his Irish mammy: May God guide, guard, and protect him.
He could solve this, but not, he’d reminded himself, without stepping into a trap set by Randome. And solve for what purpose? To get Randome? I’m the one who’d be got. Then to bring Michael Mender home? What home? Both parents dead, his father a murderer? Jaken had taught him to think like that too, outside the rule of law, its letter anyway. Justice is a much more complex law, and a greater, Jaken said. So Kevin had stopped thinking like a real cop at least two years ago already. Time to retire, again.
From the tip of swamped and burning Florida, he’d turned away, northward, then westward, travelling by slow bus back to the Point Conception Zen Center high on its bluff overlooking the dying Pacific, to retirement and Jaken. Smoking all the way.
Jaken had welcomed him with three words: “Look at you!”
It had taken three weeks of Jaken’s devoted coaching—sanzen—to quit smoking again. Three months of refusing to take all calls from Ottawa. Six months of meditation to suppress all thought of Johnson and Lucy and Michael Mender. And of Dr. Ewan Randome. In time he’d forgotten all perfectly. Or so Kevin had thought.
For here he was, falling into it all over again.
6
Short men made tall Kevin uneasy. It was like they were always circling him, stunted arms akimbo, hunkering like wrestlers looking for the take-down. And Global Patrol’s Phil LaPhoc acted as if he’d spent his forty-odd years tangling with a Napoleon complex like a triple-midget tag team. What hair he had was pasted to his pate like lines of black marker, so his head looked fractured and funny.
To be an American man, and short, and almost bald, Kevin thought, mentally patting himself down for some sympathy. He found none. Jaken was short. That helped.
But Kevin didn’t want help, especially this LaPhoc’s help. Walking ahead quickly, he tapped his shirt pocket twice—plunk-plunk—and again promised himself not to slit the stamp on the Panter’s tin. He passed through the peeled-back chain-link fence at the bottom of the yard on his way to the road, wishing he’d stayed up at the house with Brigid Ertelle and Dr. Benjamin Thomas. But considering the man’s condition, it was better Brigid talked with him. She was good with distressed men. Didn’t he know it.
“Are you feeling anything, Detective Beldon?” LaPhoc puffed up from behind, pretending he didn’t intend derision. “What’s it called again? Oh yeah: factioning?” A bad actor.
Factioning again, it wouldn’t leave him be. The non-word with which a criminology professor at the University of Ottawa had dubbed Kevin’s gift for detection, the term had stuck, thanks to the Macro’s atypically enduring interest. During study towards his master’s degree in criminology, Kevin had been the duped subject of an academic article published eventually in a fat French periodical called Criminel. He’d soon come to detest the word factioning, because it seemed to leave him out of the process altogether—his meticulous work, his mind—and talked about him as though his brain were but an inferior MYCROFT. He’d mistakenly assumed that no one in his or her right mind read Criminel. But the French did, and so of course did French-Canadians, and as had been the case for some 100 years, the obfuscating French commanded and criminology theory obeyed. Kevin had given up insisting to the curious that his detection method was just the old mixture of close observation, exhaustive research, memory-work, logic, repetition, and the play of reason and imagination. A repeated lie became truth (thank you, Macro), and Detective Kevin Beldon became identical with factioning.
LaPhoc was trying not to show that he must scuttle to keep up. He halted at the edge of the road and called at Kevin’s back, “Know what I think, Beldon?”
“No.”
Kevin was intent on the white stain left by the Vaporplaz implosion of Malachai’s stolen vehicle. LaPhoc was a distraction.
Having looked both ways, LaPhoc hurried across the road.
“We’ve combed the site with SENSOARSCAN, Detective Beldon, we know all there is to know. We got a partial bio-marker on Mr. Malachai this time: skin-bleached Euro-Caucasian, dark hair, 165 pounds, five-ten. We have blood from the scene this time, and vomit, believe it or not, so more profile to come, uh, shortly. Seems our Mr. Malachai is injured and sick in the conventional sense. That new evidence will lock the full bio, trace will be a cinch. My boys will have the complete make on him by the time we get back to the house. We’ll nab him for sure before the next kill.”
“The next kill,” Kevin sneered, shuffling through the powdery remains on the road. “Five-ten, you say? That’s about average height for an American man, eh, LaPhoc?” Abruptly he disappeared down the far embankment towards the bay. Only his voice returned: “Since when did a Vaporplaz annihilation leave so much residue?”
Detective Inspector LaPhoc rocked up on tiptoe and called, “Since our Malachai added something foreign to the target. MYCROFT’s already confirmed steel, antique steel. Dr. Thomas corroborates that his son had set two old-style animal traps, and one is missing from the scene. Malachai must have stepped in it! That’s how we got the blood! All this SENSOAR and it’s an antique mechanical trap trapped him!”
LaPhoc turned and hollered back up the hill: “Hunt, Leconte, get your thumbs out of each other’s assholes! Anything on the plasma and puke yet?”
One of the shadowy figures emerged from the trees and came up to the chain-link fence. He had a ferret face and wore the standard-issue grey suit of Global Patrol soldiers. He grinned and shook his head. No.
Kevin’s head bobbed into view, looking for a second like it was detached and riding the calm slate of the Chesapeake. He held something pinched at his expressionless face.
LaPhoc looked momentarily frightened, until he managed a snort. “Treasure-hunting, Detective Beldon? We’ve already secured Malachai’s name tag.”
“This is from the incomplete vaporization, LaPhoc. It’s a tipdisc, badly scorched. See the purple residue?” He turned it like a key in air. “It stood out against the sand. Why on earth would you end your SENSOARSCAN at the shoulder of the road? Did you even glance down the bank?”
“Because, Detective Beldon, we have more than we need from the scene. We already know from MYCROFT’s preliminary analysis of the puke that Malachai is a walking test tube of contraband enhancers. A plasma scan will fill out his bio profile. Gimme that.”
Detective Inspector LaPhoc actually lunged and Kevin held the disc high. It was LaPhoc’s recurrent nightmare become reality: jumping for something that a taller man holds out of reach. He restrained himself with effort, managing to assume a nonchalant pose, if not really reclaiming his little dignity.
“I order you to hand that over, Detective Beldon. If need be I will call on my forces for assistance.”
“Your forces?” Kevin couldn’t help but puff derision from his nose. “First we’d better see what Chief Ertelle has to say about your orders, Detective Inspector LaPhoc. Ertelle is in charge here. I understand you’ve already had to be ordered to defer to her authority?”
Kevin closed his fist on the tipdisc and strode past LaPhoc, on up the embankment at a clip and across the plastic bridge thrown over the ditch, through the peeled-back fence and on into the scrub growth. He winked at the Global Patrol pair coming towards him—the ferret face, the other plump and balding—and the two smiled.
One called past him, “Phil, the final report’s just come in, prime-coded to you.”
LaPhoc hurried up and snatched the pad: “Detective Inspector LaPhoc, Corporal Leconte.”
Kevin didn’t pause for the full MYCROFT report, afraid that LaPhoc would order his men to seize the tipdisc.
Brigid Ertelle and Dr. Benjamin Thomas stood in the kitchen at the back of the house. Brigid was dressed for work in a razor-seamed blue pantsuit. Dr. Thomas, still in the same grey suit like wet ashes, leaned back against a counter, his chin on his chest. Both looked up at the long hiss of the sliding patio door.
The bodies of mother and son still lay where they’d fallen, covered in black plastic sheets. Plum-coloured blood had oozed to its limit and crusted on the terracotta tile, like a child’s spilled pudding.
In meeting Dr. Thomas, Kevin had sensed someone who might choose not to accommodate himself to a whole new reality. He knew the feeling, from after his wife’s, Cynthia’s, suicide (suspected suicide, purported, ostensible: MYCROFT had supplied even more synonyms for what truly had been the end of Dr. Ewan Randome’s voodoo work). There had been times, long stretches, when living just didn’t seem worth the suffering. Kelly had saved him, as she continued to do. And in a very different way, so too had Dr. Ewan Randome. And Jaken, of course, always Jaken.
