Secrets typed in blood, p.7
Secrets Typed in Blood, page 7
We had skipped our evening repast, so I drove the two of us to an all-night diner where I knew the food to be edible, the silverware clean, and the booths spread far enough apart that you could have a halfway-private conversation.
Ms. P had a hamburger, I went with fried pork chops, and we both ordered chocolate egg creams, which were on the fizzy side.
“It’s like once you’re over the Brooklyn Bridge nobody can manage it,” I lamented. “It’s three ingredients, for God’s sake. Mrs. Campbell can do it and she boils chicken.”
Once we were done digging into—and throwing digs at—the meal, we tucked into the interview.
“What did you note about Miss Quick?” my boss asked.
I could have rattled off a laundry list, but I kept it simple.
“I don’t trust her,” I declared. “I know what you’re going to say, and you’re right. She rubs me the wrong way. Some people do and there’s no fixing it. But I don’t think that’s it.”
Ms. P gave one of her slow, considered nods.
“Do you think she was lying?” she asked.
“I still can’t find her tell,” I admitted. “But I definitely know she was playing footsie with the truth.”
“How do you mean?”
“The way she went on and on in some places and cut it short in others. And there were topics she was being very careful about.”
“Can you provide an example?”
I could.
“How about when she mentioned sex?” I asked. “She says she’s no virgin, but she didn’t mention anyone special. Or even anyone not so special. Also, there was the way she phrased it. She’s had ‘partners.’ ”
“Ah, yes, the gentleness around pronouns.”
“You caught that? You didn’t press her on it.”
“I assumed it was less about evasion and more about reasonable caution.”
That was a new one. Two new ones, really. Usually Ms. Pentecost treats people like oysters—prying them open and scooping out everything, meat and pearls alike. In this case, not only was my boss holding pat with an assumption rather than confirming it, but she was apparently content to let our client keep her secrets to herself.
“Reasonable caution or not, if her partners are of the female variety, that adds a wrinkle,” I said.
“How so?”
“You don’t just sidle up to a woman you don’t know and make an offer. Not unless you’re particularly daring, and I don’t read our client as that,” I said. “So I’m guessing clubs, bars, salons. That would make her life a lot less circumscribed than she’d have us believe.”
My boss stirred the chocolate that had settled at the bottom of her glass.
“Did you see anything that would corroborate this assumption?” she asked.
“Well, she didn’t use the secret handshake, so I can’t be sure.”
She did that thing with her lips she does when I’m being especially funny.
“All I’m saying is I don’t trust her,” I said. “I don’t think she’s playing it straight, and I don’t like the handcuffs she’s snapped on us.”
I settled back into the booth. Ms. Pentecost leaned back as well, tilting her chin up and resting her head on the cracked vinyl. She stayed like that long enough that I started to wonder if she was playing checkers on the tin ceiling tiles. Finally she spoke.
“I think…”
We should shake Holly Quick out of bed and demand she fill in any blanks.
We should inform the police.
We should drop this client like a hot potato.
“…that it’s time for our next appointment.”
I waved for the check.
CHAPTER 9
A morgue at midnight has a certain ambience. Maybe it’s the lighting, simultaneously too dim and too bright, where you can see more than you’d like but there’s always one corner left dark.
Or the smell—bleach and rot in equal amounts.
Or maybe it’s that just down the hall are the recently deceased, waiting patiently to be picked apart.
Hiram was one of the people that did the picking. He was a compact, delicate-boned man with deep-set eyes and a dark beard trimmed short. An always-reserved caretaker of the dead, he was the very picture of dignity.
Usually.
“They’re bastards, Will. Bastards!”
Spittle flew down into his neat beard, but he didn’t care.
“Trading the Hebrew Hammer away like that. Twelve seasons in Detroit. Forty-four home runs last year. They throw him away. And to where? Pittsburgh! What kind of city is Pittsburgh?”
“I’ve heard it has a very nice—”
“I have a cousin who just moved to Detroit. I was going to visit her this summer and take her boys to a game. Now…psssht!” He threw up his manicured hands in disgust.
“You can still see him when the Pirates play the Dodgers,” I said.
I’m not sure he heard me. He just continued on a career retrospective of Hank Greenberg and how much he meant to the American Jewish community and how if he should have been traded anywhere, it should have been to a New York team.
I nodded in agreement while Ms. Pentecost leaned patiently against the wall. Hiram was just getting into Greenberg’s wartime service when we heard whistling in the hall outside.
It was a tune I almost recognized. Its only accompaniment was the intermittent squeaking of the wheels of a gurney. I moved to hold open the double doors and let in our guests.
Both were clad in white—one draped in a sheet, the other in an orderly’s uniform at least a size too small for his lanky frame. That is where the resemblance between the two ended. While the man on the gurney had been quieted forever, Sam Lee Butcher was, I am convinced, incapable of going half a minute without speaking.
“Miss Parker, Ms. Pentecost! So good to see you! Mr. Levy was real cagey. All he said was that I should expect company tonight and I should keep Mr. Checchetto’s body handy. But I knew. Midnight visitors? Murder victim with claw marks all over him. Sam Lee, I told myself, that can only mean one thing. Pentecost and Parker are on the case!”
After situating the gurney under the room’s brightest lights, he shook our hands with enough vigor to loosen my wristbones.
“Is it just me, or have you grown?” I asked.
“It’s not just you,” Sam Lee said. He held out his arms, demonstrating how his uniform jacket ended a good two inches too soon. “This thing fit when I first got it. I’m going through a spurt, I guess. Mrs. Henry—that’s my landlady—she thinks I’ll top six feet by the time I’m…by my next birthday.”
Sam Lee was guarded about his exact age, but I was pretty sure he wasn’t legally able to buy a drink in a bar. When we’d met him the summer before, he’d been working roustabout at the Hart & Halloway Traveling Circus and Sideshow, my former employer.
A month later, the circus gave its last performance. There weren’t a lot of good jobs available for somebody with Sam Lee’s circus-acquired skill set, especially a Negro somebody.
Having once been in Sam Lee’s position, I didn’t want to leave him high and dry. Ms. P talked to Hiram, and by the time Sam Lee got off the train at Penn Station, there was a midnight shift at the morgue waiting for him.
It was a dead-end job. Sam Lee knew that. But we’d impressed on Hiram how sharp his new attendant was, so he was providing anatomy lessons on the sly. Hiram could read a dead body as easy as most people read the Sunday funnies.
“Samuel, would you please uncover Mr. Checchetto?”
Sam Lee pocketed his smile and carefully pulled the sheet down, exposing the head of the man on the gurney. Mid to late fifties, dark hair, a tidy mustache, ears that could have doubled for jug handles.
Then he pulled the sheet lower and I saw why the cops’ first thought was animal attack. A set of four ragged tears ran from the man’s throat down to his groin.
In Holly’s story “The Curse of the Red Claw,” these tears were created with a specially made glove affixed with panther claws. Of course, we couldn’t tell Hiram that.
That was another reason I didn’t like the setup Holly was forcing us into. Dumb was a look I try my best to avoid, and having to play it was a chore. But I threw myself into the role with vigor.
“I guess cause of death is no mystery,” I said. “Police still thinking animal attack?”
“The police do not confide their thoughts to me. However, there may be more of a mystery here than meets the eye,” Hiram said. “Samuel, could you better expose the center wound? At the belly, please.”
Sam Lee took a pair of forceps and used them to pry open the largest of the tears. It made a sound that I’ll do you the favor of not describing. Hiram came forward, took a pencil out of the pocket of his white coat, and inserted it into the wound.
“As you can see, it’s rather shallow,” he said. “All four of the lacerations are. Ugly, yes, but even the worst did not cut very deep.”
Ms. Pentecost leaned close enough that she could read dixon ticonderoga on the pencil. After a moment’s peering, she leaned back.
“What about the artery in the neck?” she asked, pointing at the upper end of the tears. “Did it strike the carotid?”
Hiram smiled. “An excellent question. It did hit the artery. But it was only a small cut and…Here, let me show you. Samuel, could you please bring the photos?”
Sam Lee put the forceps aside and went to a metal filing cabinet. He retrieved a folder while Hiram cleared off a counter. Sam Lee laid out a series of eight-by-tens of the crime scene. They showed Checchetto splayed out on top of his desk in the back room of his antiques shop. There was no official reason for Hiram to have crime scene photos, but he was the curious sort and had friends throughout the NYPD who traded favors.
My boss and I hovered over the snaps. I had to admit, the scene looked a lot like what Holly had dreamed up in her story.
There was something off, though.
“Do you see it, Will?”
I usually answer my boss’s unnecessarily vague questions with a wisecrack, but out of respect for the dead, I played it straight.
“Not enough blood,” I said. “There’s a stack of papers right next to him. If he got gutted on that desk, they’d be soaked.”
I sorted through the other shots. No blood pools anywhere. I looked at Hiram.
“Killed elsewhere and moved?”
“Perhaps,” he said. “However, there was only a moderate amount of blood on the body and clothes when I received it. And there was no evidence that it had been cleaned. So I have another suggestion. Samuel?”
Sam Lee went and stood attentively by the body.
“Could you explain the function of the carotids?” Hiram asked.
“The carotids—that’s the arteries on either side of the neck—they carry blood from the heart to the brain,” Sam Lee explained. “Cut them off and your brain stops working. You’re out cold. Cut them off too long and you’re dead.”
“And if they’re severed or even nicked?”
“Then you bleed out. Even if it’s just a nick, you’ll probably bleed out pretty fast.”
“Is there any time when you’d cut into the carotid and there wouldn’t be an excessive amount of blood?”
Sam Lee paused, his eyes tracking up to the ceiling in thought. Apparently this wasn’t a question he’d been prepped for, but he got to the answer quick.
“Sure,” he said, bending over and peering closely at the victim’s neck. “If the guy was already dead. Because his heart wouldn’t be pumping anymore.”
He looked at his boss to see if he’d nailed it. Hiram nodded. Sam Lee smothered a grin.
“Is that what happened in this case?” Ms. Pentecost asked. “Was Mr. Checchetto already dead when he was mutilated?”
Hiram shrugged.
“That’s for the police to decide. Or you, perhaps,” he said, with a little twinkle in his eye. “If he was dead, it happened very shortly before his mutilation. And there are no other marks of violence on the body.”
“Poison?” Ms. P suggested.
Another shrug.
“There’s no evidence of the obvious ones but…”
But there were a lot of poisons, and not all of them were obvious, is how that sentence would have ended.
“It’s also possible he was administered some form of narcotic. Something that wouldn’t kill, but would incapacitate. Something that would significantly slow the heart.”
“You mean someone could have slipped him a Mickey?” I asked.
“If you mean chloral hydrate, that’s certainly possible. Or some other sedative not easily detectable in the blood following death.”
So whoever was doing this wasn’t following Holly’s blueprint. Not really. In her story the victim fell back on his desk and was brutally killed using the clawed glove. Here it was only made to look that way.
I spread my hand out over the body, lining my fingers up to the four parallel tears. It took some doing, and not just because I wear a ladies’ size-small glove. For one thing, the rightmost tear was a little too far removed from the one next to it. I needed to stretch my pinky to make it reach.
Sam Lee watched what I was doing.
“I told them that wasn’t any animal,” he said.
“These were the detectives?” Ms. P asked.
“Yeah, Detective Staples. I told him these weren’t claws—not real claws. I don’t think they paid me any mind, though.”
“Why do you not believe this was done by an animal?” my boss asked.
“Okay, so…feeding the tigers was my job at the circus. And we had a bear for about a month. Carlotta was trying to get it to do tricks but it never worked out. Anyway, I’ve seen what big claws can do to meat, and it doesn’t look like this. Here, take a look.”
The cork was out and Sam Lee was off. We all leaned over the body.
“The tearing is right, but you’d never see all the claw marks so even like this. One would be shallower or trail off before the others. And they’re not going to be perfectly straight. They’ll curve a little. Not to mention that the spacing between the claws is all wrong.”
Sam Lee stepped back and let us see for ourselves what he was describing. Not that we’d ever suspected the mutilation was actually animal-related. But it was nice to see someone else coming to that conclusion without having Holly’s story to tip them off.
“I believe Samuel is correct,” Hiram said, apparently taking our silence for doubt. “While I do not have his experience with large carnivores, I have seen other animal attacks. A single swipe of a paw is an unlikely scenario. And the wound is unnaturally…neat.”
Neat. Not a word I’d have picked for a corpse, but he’d nailed it. The whole thing, even the crime scene photos, was very neat. Arranged.
“Thank you,” Ms. P said. “Both of you. I have no doubt Sam Lee is correct. It was a very astute observation.”
Sam Lee let out the breath he’d been holding and smiled. I knew that feeling. A compliment about your deductive prowess from Lillian Pentecost. I’ve never tried cocaine, but I imagine the rush is similar.
“Thank you both for your help,” Ms. P added. “Hiram, do you mind if I borrow these crime scene photos?”
“Of course not. They are yours.”
I scooped up the photos and retrieved our coats from the rack in the corner.
While Ms. P bundled up and Sam Lee wheeled Mr. Checchetto back from whence he came, I slipped Hiram an envelope containing a handful of bills. It was more than on previous visits since we were buying Sam Lee’s cooperation as well. It would go in the expense report under “Specialist Consultation,” which was my preferred spelling of “bribe.”
“You two seem to be getting along well,” I said.
“We are. He’s a curious young man, in both senses of the phrase.”
“It must be nice to have someone to talk to,” I said, slipping on my coat and squaring my fedora.
“I’m never short of people to talk to, Will,” he said with a straight face. “It’s just that they so rarely talk back.”
CHAPTER 10
It was nearly one o’clock by the time we slipped into the Caddy, slamming its heavy doors against the icy teeth of the wind. As I navigated the car through winter-vacant streets, we talked about what we’d learned.
By “talked,” I mean I rambled and Ms. P hmmmed and nodded in the right places.
“I don’t think we really expected someone might be walking around with a panther on a leash, but I think we can cross that off,” I said. “Hiram was right. That crime scene looked a little too neat to be real. Which is appropriate, since it started as fiction.”
A nod here.
“That’s an interesting thing about him being dead before getting gutted. We’ve got to get the medical examiner’s report on the other two victims. See if there’s any weirdness there. Beyond the obvious, I mean.”
A hmmm.
“But it’s telling, right? If Checchetto’s murder was nuts-to-bolts staged, then it’s not about somebody reading Holly’s story and wanting the thrill of re-creating things. He wants to re-create the look. I’m saying ‘he’ as shorthand. No reason a woman couldn’t be—Jesus Christ!”
I was directing the Caddy over the Brooklyn Bridge and a gust of wind broadsided us, shaking the two-ton automobile like a child’s toy. I crossed the rest of the span in silence, fighting the wheel the whole way.
Once we were back on solid ground, I picked up the thread.
“But painting a gruesome picture is the result, not the motive, right? We still don’t know the why. Which leads us back around to the questions we’d be asking in any case. Who was Checchetto? What was his life like? Who were his friends, his family? How was his store doing? Did he owe anybody money? Rub anybody the wrong way? Specifically anyone in this club he belonged to? You lie down with dogs, you get fleas, right? In this case, you sip tea with murderers, you get murdered.”
