Broadway Butchery (Memento Mori Book 3), page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Broadway Butchery
Copyright
Dedication
MEMENTO MORI
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
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About C.S. Poe
Also by C.S. Poe
Broadway Butchery
(Memento Mori: Book Three)
By
C.S. Poe
Broadway Butchery
By: C.S. Poe
The Cold Case Squad of the NYPD is overworked, understaffed, but receiving great press due to star detective Everett Larkin. His uncanny memory and Holmesian-like skills of deduction have already led to the capture of one serial killer. Now he’s identified a second predator and brought an end to their twenty-plus year reign of terror.
Routine construction at a Broadway souvenir shop leads to the discovery of a mummified woman in the wall. And when Larkin receives a mysterious VHS tape that same night, he knows it’s no coincidence. Expecting a Victorian mourning artifact to surface in this new mystery, Larkin wastes no time turning to boyfriend Ira Doyle of the Forensic Artists Unit for help.
A web of nameless victims, countless suspects, and endless lies drag Larkin and Doyle deep into the gritty past of Times Square, reopening painful wounds and testing the fortitude of their relationship. And all the while, someone is watching, biding their time until they can make Everett Larkin nothing… but a memory.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Broadway Butchery
Copyright © 2023 by C.S. Poe
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law. For permission requests and all other inquiries, contact: contact@cspoe.com
Published by Emporium Press
https://www.cspoe.com
contact@cspoe.com
Cover Art by Reese Dante
Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.
Edited by Tricia Kristufek
Copyedited by Andrea Zimmerman
Proofread by Lyrical Lines
Published 2023.
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-952133-47-3 (Trade Paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-952133-46-6 (Digital eBook)
For Trish, Andrea, Dianne, and Reese.
This book wouldn’t exist without you.
MEMENTO MORI
Remember that you must die.
Chapter One
It was Wednesday, June 10, 4:57 p.m., and there was a mummified body in the wall.
Detective Everett Larkin stood in the middle of the showroom floor for NYC Souvenirs, a hectically assembled and poorly organized tourist trap between West Fortieth and Forty-First on Broadway. Its dingy alternating-black-and-white tile floor was crowded with display stands stuffed to overcapacity with every tchotchke that Milton Glaser’s iconic I Heart NY logo could be decaled to: T-shirts, keychains, coffee mugs, license plates, snow globes, magnets, pins, tote bags, commemorative plates, phone cases, shot glasses, and what Larkin suspected might have been known colloquially as booty shorts.
Larkin slid his hands into his trouser pockets; studied the ancient ceiling fan overhead as it sluggishly pushed too-warm air around the storefront, its blades heavy with a buildup of gray fuzz; listened to the crackle of police radios through the open door at his back; and sniffed the air. It smelled closed up. Stale, musty, underlain with something sickly-sweet—fruity, but chemical in makeup.
“Ever read The Cask of Amontillado, Grim?”
Turning toward a narrow hallway on his right, Larkin watched Homicide Detective Ray O’Halloran enter the main room. He stepped around a construction light on a tripod, the harsh yellow of the halogen bulb causing his mussed strawberry-blond hair to appear almost orange. With his hip, O’Halloran checked a spinning stand of name keychains as he squeezed sideways between displays, and they shook on their hooks like rain pinging off sheet metal.
Larkin quoted, “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured.” O’Halloran stopped to stand before Larkin, his hands on his hips, sleeves rolled back, tie loosened. Sweat darkened his hairline, and his usually ruddy cheeks had more color than normal. “You bitched about the last DB—”
“Yes, well, he was only nine days dead,” Larkin interrupted.
“You closed a fuckin’ case, though, didn’t you?”
Larkin said, “I closed the murder of Marco Garcia and gained six new victims.”
“But you know who did it,” O’Halloran insisted.
Larkin narrowed his eyes. “What are you doing.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“This insistence on looking at the positives. The Alfred Niederman case garnered myself and my squad considerable media attention, and had you not punted the murder onto me, those accolades would have belonged to you. It’s decidedly out of character, considering you have accused me on more than one occasion of ‘stealing’ high-profile cases in order to obtain press and funding—which is, of course, not true, but the natural progression of a homicide case’s lifespan. When you brutes have exhausted all avenues of investigation, the Cold Case Squad steps in to solve the impossible. It’s only natural that detectives, territorial and egotistical by nature—and yes, I do include myself in that sweeping generalization—would find someone like me to be intimidating and therefore a professional adversary.”
O’Halloran laughed gruffly. “You’re hardly intimidating, Grim. What is this you’re wearing, pink?”
“It’s rosewood burgundy,” Larkin corrected, plucking at his suit coat with one hand. He’d paired the three-piece suit with a white button-down, teal pocket square, and a navy tie patterned with yellow flowers, which of course he’d matched to gold wingtips.
“It’s very colorful,” O’Halloran remarked.
“I enjoy the challenge of a thoroughly explored color palette.” Larkin waited a beat, raised one eyebrow, then asked, “Is that all.”
“Is… what all?”
“Twenty-two days ago you lamented the statistical probability of being in a room with, I quote, ‘You homos.’ I’m simply waiting for you to get in your usual jabs so that we may progress to the actual matter at hand.”
O’Halloran puffed his chest out, crossed his arms, and asked, “You want me to make a fag joke?”
Larkin considered O’Halloran’s defensive posture, the way he was anxiously tap, tap, tapping his thumb against his bicep, his evident reluctance to offer a remark similar to those he’d flaunted without remorse, but with pride, in the recent past. Larkin blinked before saying, “Ah. Interesting.”
“What is?”
Larkin sidestepped O’Halloran and began picking his way around the congested fixtures.
“Grim!”
“As a gay man working in a traditionally conservative, hyper-alpha male environment, I’m no stranger to slurs, O’Halloran,” Larkin began. “I assure you, I’ve heard them all. They’re tired, unoriginal, and I’ve experienced far worse at a much younger age. Despite progress in the recruitment and hiring of more diversity for a number of professions, I find myself having to pick and choose my battles almost daily, lest my fellow officers ostracize me for being an overly sensitive whistleblower.” Larkin reached the hallway that’d been partially obstructed by abandoned construction equipment and broken drywall littering the floor. He turned to face O’Halloran. “Would you say I give it as good as I get.”
O’Halloran tugged a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. At length, he admitted, “Sometimes you have zingers.”
“Yes. And your typical baseline begins with overt confidence and ends with anger upon being bested by someone you have, until very recently, felt superior toward. Superior not in intelligence or physique or financial stability, but in a very narrow point of view of what you believe is the correct way to be a man, i.e., sexuality. Until now. Something in your personal life has made you somehow feel uncertainty, perhaps even guilt, over your locker-room humor, otherwise our typical back-and-forth would have already concluded and we’d be discussing this supposed mummy-in-the-wall,” Larkin said, motioning between them with one hand. “Shame is a powerful emotion, one of the most difficult to admit to, which is why so many women’s magazines feature articles about men and their inability to apologize with words—for the emotionally stunted man, words are an acknowledgment of weakness instead of a chanc
e at growth—but it explains your attempt to build some sort of… comradery, if that’s what you’re doing, without properly apologizing for having called me a queer, a fag, and a homo for several years now.
“These loaded phrases are hurting you—hurt is perhaps too strong a word, but I’ll use it for the sake of making my point—so someone close to you, someone you love, has recently come out, and it’s causing you to question what you were once confident in, isn’t it. Not a brother. I peg you for midforties, O’Halloran, and I suspect a sibling’s sexuality would have long ago been a topic of discussion within the family. Not a nephew either. You can turn a blind eye to that sort of relationship. They’re not your child, after all. So, a son.” Larkin offered a lopsided smile. “Congratulations. I hope you don’t make him regret this monumental display of trust.”
“How the…?”
“Come now, Ray,” Larkin said. “We both know I’m one of the best detectives this city has ever seen.” Turning, Larkin stepped into the long hall, the heels of his wingtips crunching loudly over debris. He briefly considered the short, pudgy white man sulking in the open doorway of what appeared, at a glance, to be an office with about the same level of organization as the store-proper. So the owner of this hellhole, Larkin assumed. He shook his head, as if the visual mess was an irritating gnat, and continued deeper down the corridor, where the drywall on the left side looked like a wrecking ball had been taken to it, revealing an unlit space within.
“The NYPD’s been hiding their very own Sherlock Holmes within a small, forgotten team known as the Cold Case Squad.”
Larkin looked away from the hole in the wall. CSU Detective Neil Millett stood to one side, tugging his arms through the sleeves of his white PPE jumpsuit. Millett was a tall and slender man, a few years older than himself, Larkin suspected, with brown hair he often thought of as honey-colored, but in the harsh yellow lighting, looked more like coffee with too much cream in it. Millett was a decent cop, and one of the few officers on a scene who Larkin could trust to not give him a hard time, seeing as how Millett was gay himself, although he’d not actually voiced that particular truth aloud, so Larkin continued to pretend he hadn’t clued in on it. Millett also had a sharp tongue that, for the most part, Larkin appreciated. But it depended on his mood.
Millett zipped the front of his jumpsuit. “That was some write-up you got in the Times after the Niederman case. ‘The modern mastermind detective saved three lives, including his own partner’s.’”
—The deafening explosion of a Glock fired at close quarters, Harry Regmore sprawled on the floor like a pinned insect in an entomological study, Larkin’s erratic breathing only something he could feel not hear, and Doyle lowering his gun from firing stance—
Larkin winced, the blast still thudding in his eardrums, his head, reverberating through his entire skeleton, the air sharp with gunpowder. There’d been so much blood on Doyle’s face. Larkin cleared his throat and said to Millett, “Detective Doyle is no slouch either.”
Millett grabbed an N95 mask from the kit at his feet. “How’s he doing, anyway?”
Larkin opened his mouth to speak but was interrupted as O’Halloran entered the hall.
“Listen, Grim. It ain’t about the butt-fucking.”
Millett had his mask halfway over his face, paused, then lowered it.
Larkin turned around. Slowly, curiously, he asked with inflection, “I’m sorry?”
O’Halloran faltered temporarily under the steady gazes of both detectives, as well as the plump little shop owner still standing in his office doorway, and then, his face red, he barked, “Every guy gets backdoor curious at least once.”
Larkin replied, “A 2016 study suggests up to thirty-five percent of men in heterosexual relationships have engaged in anal intercourse.”
Millett interjected, “Does that stat refer to giving or receiving?”
Larkin turned and gave Millett an incredulous expression.
Millett pulled his mask on, grabbed his camera, said, “I’m gonna climb into this hole now,” and then ducked his head into the broken drywall.
“I just don’t understand how you can be into a—a man,” O’Halloran continued.
Larkin explained, “A recent genome-wide association study of same-sex sexual behavior indicates the answer is far more complicated than the suggestion of a ‘gay gene,’ which was the prevalent theory during the ’90s, and in fact, that human sexuality is highly polygenic. But given our still rudimentary understanding of genes and a sordid history of utilizing genetic data in an attempt to control minorities viewed as ‘undesirables,’ there has been considerable reluctance in the continued exploration of sexuality, from this specific angle. So to put it simply: I was born this way.” Larkin’s reaper-gray stare was steady.
O’Halloran, the Irish lug, took a deep breath. “But—”
“No one is asking you to participate, O’Halloran.”
“How’s that?”
Larkin said, “No one is demanding that you kiss a man, fuck a man, love a man, marry a man. You don’t even need to understand homosexual attractions, only respect our right to have them.”
“This how you boys talk at every crime scene?” the owner asked. He spoke the way New Yorkers walked—fast and with somewhere to be—an understated whiney quality in his tone.
O’Halloran retorted, “This is a private conversation.”
The owner countered, “There’s a body in there.” He pointed at the wall that Millett was rummaging around in.
“Your concern is unwarranted,” Larkin replied. “They don’t get very far when they’re dead.”
“You think you’re funny?”
O’Halloran crossed his big arms, inclined his head toward the office, and said to Larkin, “Sal Costa, the owner.”
Larkin left O’Halloran, sidled up to Costa, and said, “Detective Everett Larkin, Cold Case Squad.”
“I ain’t impressed.”
“You will be.”
“Look, how long is this gonna take?”
Larkin narrowed his eyes, studying the pugnacious man. Shorter than Larkin, Costa had white hair, a goatee peppered with black, and thick, still-black brows. He wore his trousers too high on his belly and a button-down that he’d sweated through at the armpits. A gold chain with some kind of religious pendant was visible where he’d unbuttoned the collar. Larkin pegged him as being old enough to take advantage of Krispy Kreme’s ten percent senior discount.
In his ever-consistent monotone, Larkin asked, “Do you have somewhere more important to be, Mr. Costa.”
“I got a business to run,” Costa countered. “And I sure as shit can’t do that with youse all standing around, braiding each other’s hair and talkin’ about your feelings.”
“No.”
“No, what?”
“There is no business to run,” Larkin said. “At least, not in a legal sense.”
Costa pointed down the hall toward the showroom. “What the fuck do you call that, then?”
“A front.”
“What’re you on about, Grim?” O’Halloran asked.
But Larkin ignored the other detective and said to Costa, “The ambient temperature outside is eighty-five degrees, but due to the Urban Heat Island Effect, Manhattan is just over ninety degrees today. Your storefront is located in a high foot-traffic neighborhood, but the lack of AC will be an immediate turnoff for tourists seeking both respite and souvenirs. Much of your stock is covered in a fine layer of dust—especially obvious on the kitsch snow globes that when you shake, a plastic bag floats among the snow. Some of the cheapest and most popular souvenirs to stock in gift stores are postcards and keychains, but your cards are decidedly dated in both style and content—you have three separate designs that include the Twin Towers—and while state keychains with names are quite popular with children—James, William, Olivia, and Emma statistically being some of the first to hit low stock levels—your display is full. There is also a decidedly closed-up odor, suggesting not only poor air circulation, but a lack of people. A lack of customers.” Larkin slid his hands into his pockets. “You’re also doing construction of some sort—”
Costa shot back, “I’m building a room for storage.”
