The Velvet Badge, page 16
“Well, Christ! That’s some hat trick!”
“No, that’s the job,” his partner corrected.
As these wise words were spoken, Chase emerged from the carnage-filled can looking fairly frazzled, limp of velvet nap, sapped of muscle tone, and literally wringing wet with perspiration. Beads of sweat dropped from her hair onto her little cowbell earrings. A shock of salt ran down her stockings. But despite her discomfort, the Velvet Badge showed nothing less than a brick-hard face to her “troops,” as she called them, never admitting that gore, especially this gore, shook her insides since it soon would be her baby, her mess alone to clean up. Only her hands were completely tied in this case since past passion, once again tightening its fingers on her windpipe. had trapped her.
Still, Ellia Chase stood in that doorway, taking charge, ordering Badaracz to turn off those damn zappers.
“What do you think?” Tagrowd asked her. The two cops went back a long way, with grudging respect felt on both sides.
“Is there a suspect?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said and gave Chase the story.
“No details?” she asked. “Did he get the third degree?”
“He was questioned,” Rainer answered.
“Anyone see it?”
“Just investigative personnel.”
“Well, then, that’s fine.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Oh, goodness me,” she suddenly said. There was a faint breeze blowing in from the window. Chase let her neck uncoil to catch it. You couldn’t say this refreshed her, but inspiration seemed to follow. “Would you be comfortable heading this one?”
Tagrowd agreed to lead the investigation after assurances he could boss Simpson around.
“Tell you what,” the Velvet Badge concluded. “I’ll grill this Mick.” She stopped with her mouth hung open.
“Murphy.”
“Right. I’ll grill Murphy and you and the troops poke around.” She patted his arm. “See what you can find.”
“Sure thing.”
“Nice pow-wow?” Badaracz asked him, after the big boss had flown the coop.
“A little respect, please?”
“Huh?”
“For the dead,” Rainer joked. “By the way, I’m driving this bus.”
Miodrag was glad to hear it and, on Tagrowd’s orders, discovered on the top of the dead woman’s armoire, carefully hidden behind a screen of used handbags, the darker side of the Vatican Library, or items of the same rumored ilk.
First, objects d’art that doubled as dildos. Creams and rare ointments with purple prose labels and contents that burned.
Second, a yard-thick collection of girl-on-girl skin magazines.
Third, most of the foolscap diaries Capers had reviewed just before her throttling and dismemberment. These were filled with jottings in a surprisingly child-like scrawl, recounting close encounters of the most intimate kind. Blow-by-blow accounts of Greenbergér’s prodigious sexual exploits, with names unflinchingly named. This was rather a pity, because the participants in those trysts would have to be contacted by the police, likely resulting in a storm of embarrassment and negative repercussions for a surprisingly large number of very important people.
“Hey, will you look at this!” Miodrag giggled, thumbing the stash of joy rags. “There’s pages stuck together!”
“Give ‘em here,” Tagrowd ordered. He gingerly peeled one iron-strong bond apart, or tried to, for the bond held fast, tearing the pages.
“I dunno, Rain, do they really screw like that?” Tagrowd said nothing. “I’ve read stuff about it,” his young partner continued. “But, jeez. . .”
Rainer, too, had heard those rumors. He flipped through more sections (“Mama!” opined Miodrag) until he found an especially graphic pictorial, featuring long-limbed black-and-white models with a busty Asian gal sandwiched in-between. (“Look at them do each other!”) Detective Tagrowd raised the periodical to his nostrils, expecting a mackerel smell from the human glue, only to find a lighter, more familiar scent mingled with the printer’s ink. A touch like stale candy. Caramels? The lab would identify this as a male’s calling card.
“It’s just Nature,” Rainer answered. But the older hand’s mind was already miles away, a floor or two down, with Salvo Murphy, stringing information together like Lifesavers on a wire abacus.
“I mean, they know about men, right?”
Well, Ellia Chase sure did, and had one. Right this minute, doubtless on his knees, handing her some story about driving up to the house (like he did) and finding Greenbergér (like she was).
“Are they scared of what we’re packing?”
Chase certainly wasn’t. She had more balls than the two of them put together. She’d shake a story out of Murphy for sure. Like him finding that sitcom writer, sliced and diced.
—But when and after what?—
Yeah, Rainer thought. Salvo used that ashtray. Made himself coffee. And trucked away the dirty laundry when the detective told him not to.
“And using fingers, Tagrowd? Fingers? Don’t they have a clue what they’re missing?”
“I’m no judge on that, but we’ve got plenty of work to do here.” Always a take-charge guy, Rainer was happy to start pushing Simpson around. “Is that bathroom done yet?”
“Enough to print and assemble life-size.”
“And the bedroom?”
“Yeah-yeah!” she said, photographing everything in sight and sending the entire enchilada to the lab for analysis She even bagged the zapper’s bug tray because you just never knew.
In the meantime, Simpson’s assistants had zippered up all the carrion they’d found in the tub, tossed Capers’ head in besides and lugged their burden hiked over the shoulder, and down the stairs like Santa coming down the chimney. “Ho-ho-ho!” they joked. Then it was time to open the dead woman’s luggage.
“Whoa! Not so fast, boys!” the photographer instructed. “Remember,” she teased, pointing to her bread and butter, “this old fella’s got to be clicking!” She set her apertures, uncapped the lens.
Which gave Rainer time enough to run his thoughts back to the little man from Baby’s Breath. He had made himself so at home, having the run of the house. He would know where all the dirty linen was and would look forward to this particular stop with its rich cache of his favorite: lesbian porn.
Salvo would sense that no one was home and run quick like a bunny to the upstairs bedroom to open her treasure chest armoire, reach for his favs, unzip, and merrily pleasure himself into pages that would now be thoroughly scrutinized by experts.
Then he’d stop, light a cigarette, and drift, ever so slowly, back to his livelihood: a dreary line of dampness on the towel rack and soiled underclothes in the hamper. He’d been incompletely absorbed gathering those cast-offs, until the complications started and he noticed something dead out of the corner of his eye, and then something obviously more dead, covered with filth, and placed dead-center in the bottom of a toilet.
Finally, he’d see her luggage leaking blood in the bedroom as he ran to the phone downstairs. This was the very same luggage that Detective Tagrowd was now about to open, because Mrs. Simpson had signaled, “OK, boys, let’s get this going! We’re ready! We’re shooting!”
Meanwhile, Detective Badaracz latched onto a superbly mean thought, which he wanted to share with his partner. He led things off with a hearty “Hey, Rain!”
To which Tagrowd, annoyed and unable to work the latches, replied “What?”
“Did you know there’s only one sure way to kill a dyke?”
“What?” This was all Rainer said because here his persistence finally paid off. Greenbergér’s suitcases popped open and a bloated pair of legs and arms, released from their prison, whizzed across the room. It was the old snakes in the peanut brittle gag.
“Only one sure way! Drive a cock through her heart!”
Chapter 5 Daisy and the Chipmunks
The old pair of antlers hung on the office wall, slightly off-center. And, while expected, the telephone conversation knocked Ellia Chase off balance.
The first harsh ring of the instrument that Wednesday was like a sudden grope from behind. As it intruded, half a slurp of sweetly creamed wake-up coffee ran down the front of her Lane Bryant blouse, a thumb-smudged copy of the New York North Star fluttered to the floor, and the city’s chief of police detectives whispered, “Son of a bitch!” An expression of frustration totally in keeping with her exalted position’s current trajectory.
Ellia gritted her teeth to stifle a scream after hitting the side of her heavy oak desk in her mad dash to the phone. As she put the hard red plastic receiver in her ear, she heard “Fuckin’ answer already!” blasting from its earpiece. Sadly, this was a standard summons from Lenny Ray Liebtag, New York’s short-tempered thin-haired mayor, whose popularity, despite the enormous personal charm he now displayed, was inexplicably on the wane with increasing blocks of voters.
The connection sounded thin and distant, like shouts heard through a plate-glass window. “C’mon!” Hizzoner thundered, pulling out all the stops, “You fuckin’ better talk to me!” Chase lost her nerve and replaced the receiver, content to watch tugs and various other marine craft power their way along the East River. But Mayor Liebtag was nothing if not insistent, re-dialed and this time got a first-ring pickup. “Don’t fuck with me, Chief! You better believe I’m not in the mood!”
Chase took the hint, then glanced at the front-page photo that had prompted his call and squeezed her into the tightest corner of any department head in recent memory. “Seen the paper yet?” Hizzoner wanted to know.
“I’m looking at it now,” the chief said and proceeded to explain how the department traitor who’d leaked the photo had already been sacked first thing that morning.
“Sacked?” Hizzoner shouted. “I don’t give two shits about sacked! I want to see our people taking charge! Briefing the press with a perp in cuffs TODAY or I swear to fuckin’ Christ you’ll wish it were your head attracting flies in that toilet!”
That didn’t leave Chase much wiggle room. Certainly not for a joke that might have cushioned the blow under less dramatic circumstances. Instead, having made his position perfectly clear, Liebtag lost no time washing his hands of Ellia, muttered “Stupid bitch!” to a trusted aide as he slammed down the phone and, within minutes, was tap-dancing his way around reporters’ questions on the steps of City Hall.
The time of his call was noted in the chief’s official logbook, whose cover was embossed with the official seal of New York City. Later that morning, once her hands had stopped shaking, Chase recovered her bearings sufficiently to re-focus on Mrs. Simpson’s betrayal. For there it was again: Capers’ sawn-off head, grinning up at her from Page One of the city’s tabloid of record, resplendent in its purloined crime scene photo. Covered in excrement of the man-made kind, the grisly trophy had the unsettling appearance of a black-and-white Caesar salad. Even more ghastly, Ellia saw, it sat centerstage under a raised toilet seat that, in softer focus, might easily be mistaken for a halo.
“Sweet Christ,” said the chief over a ticklish back throat as she began to piece together how she’d managed to land dead-center of this mess. She thought back to a drunken pass she’d declined from Simpson at an office Christmas party, in what felt like prehistory, that had now boomeranged to haunt her. Unknown to Chase, its trigger was a tête-á-tête from the evening before, after Mrs. Simpson had matched Hoagland Newell drink for drink in his Ansonia six. The columnist convinced her to swap twenty-five years’ experience as an “also-ran” in the police department for a front-page North Star parting shot against the Velvet Badge.
Ellia, in contrast, didn’t “do” pettiness or spite, would never even consider it. So when the embittered photographer in oversized pearls left a flaming bag of poo on her doorstep, courtesy of the North Star’s star columnist, it only deepened the despair that tended to overwhelm the chief whenever summer turned to fall, marking yet another year since her brother Rudy had wandered away from his nurturing herd, rubbed noses with a speeding Buick and been given a lift to the great beyond.
“Don’t let it get you down,” her father had told her, dusting shelves of Christ-child figurines in his store. “You can’t change plans that the Big Guy’s made for us! Remember, ‘Life’s for the living!’” Ellia supposed his advice made sense for some, probably most, and wished she could take it to heart herself. But she couldn’t bury her dead as simply as her dad seemed to do, stuffing emotions in some box like a pile of old Christmas cards. As the years flew by and her professional success blossomed beyond belief, Chase’s dreams and, in time, her waking life grew increasingly haunted by her lost sibling.
This reached crisis level after she had been promoted to chief. Looking down and back from that lofty pinnacle, she began displaying the little critter’s crumpled antlers over her desk, like a nun might teach third graders under the watchful eye of the Nazarene on His cross, and said they were a “hunting trophy” to keep visitors in the dark. “That must’ve been some buck,” she often heard. “He sure was,” was her blushed reply.
The guests would ramble on at length about base camps, hunting caps,10-power scopes and chain-tread boots, while Ellia buried her sorrow in the makeshift memorial floating above her head. Much as she contemplated their chamois texture now, in the wake of Liebtag’s phone call, and, shedding a tear or two, cursed her job, then the entire police force and city in which she’d wasted so much time, far from the heaven on earth where she’d grown up with Rudy.
The mayor’s tirade was merely a corrosive frosting, spread on her cake of exposed nerves. Two days earlier, the layers of sponge came straight from Capers’ bedroom when Sadasia reached out to her with a panicky out-of-the-past S.O.S. that cheered its recipient like a writ of exhumation.
Ellia had found herself entirely startled, like the proverbial deer in the headlights, by Trayne’s threat to expose their desperate secret. Fearing the worst, New York’s chief of police detectives did as she was told, rather than test the resolve of her ex. She sidestepped an important power breakfast in her office floor’s conference room, then collected her thoughts in One Police Plaza’s garage. Slipping on seldom-worn horn-rim glasses, she cautiously drove in the slow right lane, over the great bridge, and was eventually sucker-punched to a destination as bizarre as Brooklyn, knowing full well that the route Sadasia had chosen for her couldn’t possibly end well.
And there she was: drawn again to a younger woman who retained her unique, unstable charm and who stood before her in the death house with nary a stitch on, smoke in hand and quivering at the top of Greenbergér’s stairs, much as Ellia had imagined her those many years before, the evening after Rudy’s passing, during their last long-distance call—a nervous wreck, too fo’ed to even dress herself.
“What took you so long?” was Sadasia’s way of saying “thanks” for allowing her life to be upended and riding to her rescue. Initially Ellia had no response, noticing instead, and not in a motherly way, how the little minx had kept herself just as tight and supple as she’d been as a college freshman. But she clearly also had been at it for days. Chase could easily imagine the resulting dirty Polaroids. For the moment, though, she put those out of her mind as an old emotion came roaring back to reassert itself.
Sadasia’s mock-almond eyes looked like a trembling cat’s in a kill shelter. “Take me home.” And the chief, succumbing to a fatal weakness of resolve, swished her sweaty velvet skirt up the steep stairs, embraced her troubled, errant child and let her know, barely above a whisper, that “I missed you, too, honey.”
That was all that it took to defuse Sadasia Trayne’s resentful impatience. She allowed the chief to coax her down the hall, past the dead woman’s collection of art, erotica, or kitsch (call it what you will), where a sickly odor of blood had fouled the air. They entered the bedroom, where Greenbergér’s bug zappers turned Ellia’s stomach, as did Sadasia’s thoughtless ease as she lolled on the bed, taking long puffs from a filtered menthol and smoothing the down of her milky skin. She was waiting calmly for whatever came next, as she would with a Cook’s Tour tasting menu.
Ellia toured the charnel house bathroom, turning off the shower to clear the steam and see what there was to see. Nosing in the armoire through Capers’ remaining diaries, she began to remember, reading selected entries, her own bitter encounter with Sadasia’s jealous streak. She wasn’t half sure that she bought her old chum’s gospel-truth tale of riotous sex, mind-numbing drugs and rogue cops who, to hear her tell it, only appeared in dreams. The chief’s uncertainty rang out loud and clear when she asked, “Did anyone see you?”
“Where?”
“At that bar?” She underplayed the word.
“That was the point!” This was something outside of Ellia’s DNA. “I wasn’t a stranger,” Trayne explained, “and they all knew who she was.” She pointed at the leaky luggage. “She used to be a big-shot.”
“They saw you leave together?”
“Of course they saw! And we did leave together.”
No doubt, but her lack of discretion put them both at risk. The chief plotted damage control between anxiety attacks, wrapping Sadasia in a sheet from the linen closet and sanitizing the crime scene as best she could before turning the shower’s hot water back on to full.
When the murder scene finally breathed the anonymity she’d been aiming to impose, Chase led her papoose, her Gandhi, her swaddled babe with the bow-legged walk, down Capers’ many flights of stairs confident the situation was no longer hopeless. Moving from the house, they got in the getaway car and, before the morning rush was at its worst, reached a prestige address on the Upper East Side.
Thankful for her deliverance, Sadasia arrived at her new home-away-from-home hidden in the trunk of the chief’s unmarked Lincoln. And as we know from our reading, nearly 48 hours after Ms. Trayne’s arrival, Ellia Chase almost felt ready to check into a home herself.
